THE COMMON MAN
by
G. K. Chesterton
First Published 1950 By Sheed And Ward, Inc. New York
THE COMMON MAN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ON READING MONSTERS AND THE MIDDLE AGES WHAT NOVELISTS ARE FOR THE SONG OF ROLAND THE SUPERSTITION OF SCHOOL THE ROMANCE OF A RASCAL PAYING FOR PATRIOTISM THE PANTOMIME READING THE RIDDLE A TALE OF TWO CITIES GOD AND GOODS FROM MEREDITH TO RUPERT BROOKE THE DANGERS OF NECROMANCY GIOTTO AND ST. FRANCIS THE NEW GROOVE THE REAL DR. JOHNSON RABELAISIAN REGRETS THE HOUND OF HEAVEN THE FRIVOLOUS MAN TWO STUBBORN PIECES OF IRON HENRY JAMES THE STRANGE TALK OF TWO VICTORIANS LAUGHTER TALES FROM TOLSTOI THE NEW CASE FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS VULGARITY THE REVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY—WHY? VANDALISM ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING THE ERASTIAN ON THE ESTABLISHMENT THE END OF THE MODERNS WALTER DE LA MARE THE MEANING OF METRE CONCERNING A STRANGE CITY THE EPITAPH OF PIERPONT MORGAN THE NEW BIGOTRY BOOKS FOR BOYS THE OUTLINE OF LIBERTY A NOTE ON NUDISM CONSULTING THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA IF I HAD ONLY ONE SERMON TO PREACH IF DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA HAD MARRIED MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
THE COMMON MAN
The explanation, or excuse, for this essay is to be found in a certain notion, which seems to me very obvious, but which I have never, as it happens, seen stated by anybody else. It happens rather to cut across the common frontiers of current controversy. It can be used for or against Democracy, according to whether that swear-word is or is not printed with a big D. It can be connected, like most things, with religion; but only rather indirectly with my own religion. It is primarily the recognition of a fact, quite apart from the approval or disapproval of the fact. But it does involve the assertion that what has really happened, in the modern world, is practically the precise contrary of what is supposed to have happened there.
The thesis is this: that modern emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in rather special and narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric sort of liberty to some of the hobbies of the wealthy, and occasionally to some of the more humane lunacies of the cultured. The only thing that it has forbidden is common sense, as it would have been understood by the common people. Thus, if we begin with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that a man really has become more free to found a sect. But the Common Man does not in the least want to found a sect. He is much more likely, for instance, to want to found a family. And it is exactly there that the modern emancipators are quite likely to begin to frustrate him; in the name of Malthusianism or Eugenics or Sterilisation or at a more advanced stage of progress, probably, Infanticide. It would be a model of modern liberty to tell him that he might preach anything, however wild, about the Virgin Birth, so long as he avoided anything like a natural birth; and that he was welcome to build a tin chapel to preach a twopenny creed, entirely based on the text, “Enoch begat Methuselah”, so long as he himself is forbidden to beget anybody. And, as a matter of historical fact, the sects which enjoyed this sectarian freedom, in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, were generally founded by merchants or manufacturers of the comfortable, and sometimes of the luxurious classes. On the other hand, it is strictly to the lower classes, to use the liberal modern title for the poor, that such schemes as Sterilisation are commonly directed and applied.
It is the same when we pass from the Protestant world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Progressive world of the nineteenth and twentieth. Here the form of freedom mostly claimed, as a boast and a dogma, is the freedom of the Press. It is no longer merely a freedom of pamphlets but a freedom of papers; or rather, it is less and less a freedom at all, and more and more a monopoly. But the important point is that the process, the test and the comparison are the same as in the first example. Modern emancipation means this: that anybody who can afford it can publish a newspaper. But the Common Man would not want to publish a newspaper, even if he could afford it. He might want, for instance, to go on talking politics in a pothouse or the parlour of an inn. And that is exactly the sort of really popular talk about politics which modern movements have often abolished: the old democracies by forbidding the pothouse, the new dictatorships by forbidding the politics.
Or again, it is the boast of recent emancipated ethics and politics not to put any great restraints upon anybody who wants to publish a book, especially a scientific book, full of psychology or sociology; and perhaps unavoidably full of perversions and polite pornography. As that modern tendency increased, it was less and less likely that the police would interfere very much with a man publishing the sort of book that only the wealthy could publish with sumptuous artistic plates or scientific diagrams. It is much more probable, in most modern societies, that the police would be found interfering with a man singing a song, of a coarse and candid description, bawling out a ballad of the grosser sort, or even using the more restrained medium of prose with a similar lack of restraint. Yet there is a great deal to be said for song, or even speech, of the old ribald sort, as compared with writing of the new sort, when it is at once analytic and anarchic. The old obscenity had a gusto and a great virility even in its violence, which is not easily rendered in a diagram or a table of statistics and the old was always normal and never had any of the horrors of abnormality. The point is that, here again, the Common Man does not generally want to write a book, whereas he may occasionally want to sing a song. He certainly does not want to write a book on psychology or sociology— or to read, it. But he does want to talk, to sing, to shout, to yell and howl on due and suitable occasions; and, rightly or wrongly, it is when he is thus engaged that he is much more likely to fall foul of a policeman than when he is (as he never is) writing a scientific study of a new theory of sex. The upshot of uplift, in the modern sense, is the same in practice as in the previous examples. In the actual atmosphere of the age, men will still be arrested for using a certain kind of language, long after they cannot be arrested for writing a certain kind of literature.
It would be easy to give other examples; but these contemporary examples are already too continuous to be a coincidence. It is equally true, for instance, that the liberating movement of the eighteenth century, the life in the American and French Revolutions, while it did really vindicate many virtues of republican simplicity and civic liberty, also accepted as virtues several things that were obviously vices: that had been recognised as vices long before, and are now again beginning to be recognised as vices so long afterwards. Where even ambition had once been a pardonable vice, avarice became an utterly unpardonable virtue. Liberal economics too often meant merely giving to those already rich the liberty to grow richer, and, magnificently granting to the poor the permission to remain rather poorer than before. It was much more certain that the usurer was released to practise usury than that the peasant was released from the practices of the usurer. It was much more certain that the Wheat Pit was as big as the Bottomless Pit, than that the man who grew wheat would ever be found anywhere except at the bottom.
There was a sense in which “liberal economics” were a proclamation of freedom, for the few who were rich enough to be free. Nobody thought there was anything queer about talking of prominent public men “gambling” in the Wheat Pit. But all this time, there were laws of all kinds against normal human gambling; that is, against games of chance. The poor man was prevented from gambling, precisely because he did not gamble so much as the rich man. The beadle or the policeman might stop children from playing chuck-farthing; but it was strictly because it was only a farthing that was chucked. Progress never interfered with the game of chuck-fortune, because much more than a farthing was being chucked. The enlightened and emancipated age especially encouraged those who chucked away other people’s fortunes instead of their own. But anyhow, the comparison remains continuous and clear. Progress, in the sense of the progress that has progressed since the sixteenth century, has upon every matter persecuted the Common Man; punished the gambling he enjoys and permitted the gambling he cannot follow; restrained the obscenity that might amuse him and applauded the obscenity that would certainly bore him; silenced the political quarrels that can be conducted among men and applauded the political stunts and syndicates that can only be conducted by millionaires; encouraged anybody who had anything to say against God, if it was said with a priggish and supercilious accent; but discouraged anybody who had anything to say in favour of Man, in his common relations to manhood and motherhood and the normal appetites of nature. Progress has been merely the persecution of the Common Man.
Progress has a hagiology, a martyrology, a mass of miraculous legends of its own, like any other religion; and they are mostly false and belong to a false religion. The most famous is the fancy that the young and progressive person is always martyred by the old and ordinary person. But it is false. It is the old and ordinary person who is almost always the martyr. It is the old and ordinary person who has been more and more despoiled of all his old and ordinary rights. In so far as this progress progresses, it is far more likely that six million men will be forbidden to go to sleep, because six men say that certain breathing exercises are a substitute for slumber, than that any of the six million somnambulists will wake up sufficiently to clout the six men over their highbrowed but half-witted heads. There is no normal thing that cannot now be taken from the normal man. It is much more likely that a law will be passed to forbid the eating of grain (notoriously the parent of poisons like beer and whisky) than that it will be even faintly suggested, to men of that philosophy, that the economic evil is that men cannot grow grain, and that the ethical evil is that men are still despised for growing it. Given the purely progressive principle, and nothing else as a guide to our future, it is entirely possible that they may be banged or buried alive for growing it. But of course, in a scientific age, they will be electrocuted—or perhaps only tortured by electricity.
Thus far my thesis is this: that it is not the Uncommon Man who is persecuted; but rather the Common Man. But this brings me into direct conflict with the contemporary reactions, which seems to say, in effect, that the Common Man had much better be persecuted. It is quite certain that many modern thinkers and writers honestly feel a contempt for the Common Man; it is also quite certain that I myself feel a contempt for those who feel this contempt. But the actual issue must be faced more fully; because what is called the reaction against democracy is at this moment the chief result of democracy. Now on this quarrel I am democratic, or at least defiant of the attacks of democracy. I do not believe that most modern people have seen the real point of the advantage or disadvantage of popular rule; and my doubt can be very largely suggested and summarised under this title of the Common Man.
To put it briefly; it is now the custom to say that most modern blunders have been due to the Common Man. And I should like to point out what appalling blunders have in fact been due to the Uncommon Man. It is easy enough to argue that the mob makes mistakes; but as a fact it never has a chance even to make mistakes until its superiors have used their superiority to make much worse mistakes. It is easy to weary of democracy and cry out for an intellectual aristocracy. But the trouble is that every intellectual aristocracy seems to have been utterly unintellectual. Anybody might guess beforehand that there would be blunders of the ignorant. What nobody could have guessed, what nobody could have dreamed of in a nightmare, what no morbid mortal imagination could ever have dared to imagine, was the mistakes of the well-informed. It is true, in a sense, to say that the mob has always been led by more educated men. It is much more true, in every sense, to say that it has always been misled by educated men. It is easy enough to say the cultured man should be the crowd’s guide, philosopher and friend. Unfortunately, he has nearly always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and a very shallow philosopher. And the actual catastrophes we have suffered, including those we are now suffering, have not in historical fact been due to the prosaic practical people who are supposed to know nothing, but almost invariably to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything. The world may learn by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mistakes of the learned.
To go back no further than the seventeenth century, the quarrel between the Puritans and the populace was originally due to the pride of a few men in being able to read a printed book, and their scorn for people who had good memories, good traditions, good stories, good songs, and good pictures in glass or gold or graven stone, and therefore had less need of books. It was a tyranny of literates over illiterates. But it was the literates who were narrow, sullen, limited and often oppressive; it was the illiterates who were, at least relatively, gay and free and fanciful and imaginative and interested in everything. The Uncommon Men, the elect of the Calvinist theory, did undoubtedly lead the people along the next stretch of the path of progress; but what it led to was a prison. The book-reading rulers and statesmen managed to establish the Scottish Sabbath. Meanwhile, a thousand traditions, of the sort they would have trampled out, yet managed to trickle down from the medieval poor to the modern poor, and lingering as legends in countless cottages and farmhouses, were collected by Scott (often repeated orally by people who could not read or write) to combine in the construction of the great Scottish Romances, which profoundly moved and partly inspired the Romantic Movement throughout the world.
When we pass to the eighteenth century, we find the same part played by a new and quite contrary party; differing from the last in everything except in being the same sort of rather dried up aristocracy. The new Uncommon Men, now leading the people, are no longer Calvinists, but a dry sort of Deists drying up more and more like Atheists; and they are no longer pessimists but the reverse; only their optimism is often more depressing than pessimism. There were the Benthamites, the Utilitarians, the servants of the Economic Man; the first Free-Traders. They have the credit of having first made clear the economic theories of the modern state; and the calculations on which were mainly based the politics of the nineteenth century. It was they who taught these things scientifically and systematically to the public, and even to the populace. But what were the things, and what were the theories? Perhaps the best and broadest of them was a most monstrous and mythical superstition of Adam Smith; a theological theory that providence had so made the world that men might be happy through their selfishness; or, in other words, that God would overrule everything for good, if only men could succeed in being sufficiently bad. The intellectuals in this epoch taught definitely and dogmatically that if only men would buy and sell freely, lend or borrow freely, sweat or sack freely, and in practice, steal or swindle freely, humanity would be happy. The Common Man soon found out how happy; in the Slums where they left him and in the Slump to which they led him.
We need not continue, through the last two centuries, all the tale of the frenzy and folly inflicted by the fickleness of the educated class on the relative stability of the uneducated. The fickle intellectuals next rushed to the other extreme, and became Socialists, despising small property as they had despised popular tradition. It is quite true that these intellectuals had a lucid interval in which they proclaimed some primary truths along with many priggish falsehoods. Some of them did rightly exalt liberty and human dignity and equality, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But even that was so much mishandled that there is now a disposition to deny the truth along with the falsehood. There has been a reaction against Democracy; or, in plain words, the prigs are now too bored even to go on with their normal routine about the Common Man; the familiar routine of oppressing him in practice and adoring him in theory.
I do not adore him, but I do believe in him; at least I believe in him much more than I believe in them. I think the actual history of the relations between him and them, as I have narrated it, is enough to justify my preference. I repeat that they have had all the educational advantages over him; they have always led him; and they have always misled him. And even in becoming reactionaries, they remain as raw and crude as when they were revolutionaries. Their anti-democracy is as much stuffed with cant as their democracy. I need only allude to the detestable new fashion of referring to ordinary men as morons. First, it is pedantry, the dullest form of vanity; for a moron is only the Greek for a fool; and it is mostly sham pedantry, for most of those who mention morons hardly know they are talking Greek, still less why on earth they should. It also involves this moral evil: that a man who says that men are mostly fools knows at least that he has often made a fool of himself; whereas the morons are thought of like monkeys; as if they were a fixed tribe or caste. The Common Man may well be the victim of a new series of tyrannies, founded on this scientific fad of regarding him as a monkey. But it is doubtful whether he can be much more persecuted for having the instincts of a moron, than he has already been for having the instincts of a man.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
The greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies is also, from a certain point of view, the greatest of his plays. No one would maintain that it occupied this position in the matter of psychological study if by psychological study we mean the study of individual characters in a play. No one would maintain that Puck was a character in the sense that Falstaff is a character, or that the critic stood awed before the psychology of Peaseblossom. But there is a sense in which the play is perhaps a greater triumph of psychology than Hamlet itself. It may well be questioned whether in any other literary work in the world is so vividly rendered a social and spiritual atmosphere. There is an atmosphere in Hamlet, for instance, a somewhat murky and even melodramatic one, but it is subordinate to the great character, and morally inferior to him; the darkness is only a background for the isolated star of intellect. But A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a psychological study, not of a solitary man, but of a spirit that unites mankind. The six men may sit talking in an inn; they may not know each other’s names or see each other’s faces before or after, but night or wine or great stories, or some rich and branching discussion may make them all at one, if not absolutely with each other, at least with that invisible seventh man who is the harmony of all of them. That seventh man is the hero of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A study of the play from a literary or philosophical point of view must therefore be founded upon some serious realisation of what this atmosphere is. In a lecture upon As You Like It, Mr. Bernard Shaw made a suggestion which is an admirable example of his amazing ingenuity and of his one most interesting limitation. In maintaining that the light sentiment and optimism of the comedy were regarded by Shakespeare merely as the characteristics of a more or less cynical pot-boiler, he actually suggested that the title “As You Like It” was a taunting address to the public in disparagement of their taste and the dramatist’s own work. If Mr. Bernard Shaw had conceived of Shakespeare as insisting that Ben Jonson should wear Jaeger underclothing or join the Blue Ribbon Army, or distribute little pamphlets for the non-payment of rates, he could scarcely have conceived anything more violently opposed to the whole spirit of Elizabethan comedy than the spiteful and priggish modernism of such a taunt. Shakespeare might make the fastidious and cultivated Hamlet, moving in his own melancholy and purely mental world, warn players against an over-indulgence towards the rabble. But the very soul and meaning of the great comedies is that of an uproarious communion between the public and the play, a communion so chaotic that whole scenes of silliness and violence lead us almost to think that some of the “rowdies” from the pit have climbed over the footlights. The title “As You Like It”, is, of course, an expression of utter carelessness, but it is not the bitter carelessness which Mr. Bernard Shaw fantastically reads into it; it is the god-like and inexhaustible carelessness of a happy man. And the simple proof of this is that there are scores of these genially taunting titles scattered through the whole of Elizabethan comedy. Is “As You Like It ” a title demanding a dark and ironic explanation in a school of comedy which called its plays “What you Will”, “A Mad World, My Masters”, “If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It”, “The Devil is an Ass”, “An Humorous Day’s Mirth”, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”? Every one of these titles is flung at the head of the public as a drunken lord might fling a purse at his footman. Would Mr. Shaw maintain that “If It Be Not Good, the Devil Is In It”, was the opposite of “As You Like It”, and was a solemn invocation of the supernatural powers to testify to the care and perfection of the literary workmanship? The one explanation is as Elizabethan as the other.
Now in the reason for this modern and pedantic error lies the whole secret and difficulty of such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply that their logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realise As You Like It if we are always considering it as we understand it. We cannot have A Midsummer’s Night Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the sine quâ non of man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of judging is possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of vision at all. At least it is questionable whether the Elizabethan did not know more about both worlds than the modern intellectual; it is not altogether improbable that Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer vision of the fairies, but would have shot very much straighter at a deer and netted much more money for his performances than a member of the Stage Society.
In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck. Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic scepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself. The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius. But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humour and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.
It is a trite matter, of course, though in a general criticism a more or less indispensable one to comment upon another point of artistic perfection, the extraordinarily human and accurate manner in which the play catches the atmosphere of a dream. The chase and tangle and frustration of the incidents and personalities are well known to every one who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. While following out clearly and legally the necessary narrative of the drama, the author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is the pursuit of the man we cannot catch, the flight from the man we cannot see; here is the perpetual returning to the same place, here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire, the substitution of one face for another face, the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies, the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it is important. It is perhaps somewhat more worth remarking that there is about this confusion of comedy yet another essential characteristic of dreams. A dream can commonly be described as possessing an utter discordance of incident combined with a curious unity of mood; everything changes but the dreamer. It may begin with anything and end with anything, but if the dreamer is sad at the end he will be sad as if by prescience at the beginning; if he is cheerful at the beginning he will be cheerful if the stars fall. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has in a most singular degree effected this difficult, this almost desperate subtlety. The events in the wandering wood are in themselves, and regarded as in broad daylight, not merely melancholy but bitterly cruel and ignominious. But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice, is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream. The creation of a brooding sentiment like this, a sentiment not merely independent of but actually opposed to the events, is a much greater triumph of art than the creation of the character of Othello.
It is difficult to approach critically so great a figure as that of Bottom the Weaver. He is greater and more mysterious than Hamlet, because the interest of such men as Bottom consists of a rich subconsciousness, and that of Hamlet in the comparatively superficial matter of a rich consciousness. And it is especially difficult in the present age which has become hag-ridden with the mere intellect. We are the victims of a curious confusion whereby being great is supposed to have something to do with being clever, as if there were the smallest reason to suppose that Achilles was clever, as if there were not on the contrary a great deal of internal evidence to indicate that he was next door to a fool. Greatness is a certain indescribable but perfectly familiar and palpable quality of size in the personality, of steadfastness, of strong flavour, of easy and natural self-expression. Such a man is as firm as a tree and as unique as a rhinoceros, and he might quite easily be as stupid as either of them. Fully as much as the great poet towers above the small poet the great fool towers above the small fool. We have all of us known rustics like Bottom the Weaver, men whose faces would be blank with idiocy if we tried for ten days to explain the meaning of the National Debt, but who are yet great men, akin to Sigurd and Hercules, heroes of the morning of the earth, because their words were their own words, their memories their own memories, and their vanity as large and simple as a great hill. We have all of us known friends in our own circle, men whom the intellectuals might justly describe as brainless, but whose presence in a room was like a fire roaring in the grate changing everything, lights and shadows and the air, whose entrances and exits were in some strange fashion events, whose point of view once expressed haunts and persuades the mind and almost intimidates it, whose manifest absurdity clings to the fancy like the beauty of first-love, and whose follies are recounted like the legends of a paladin. These are great men, there are millions of them in the world, though very few perhaps in the House of Commons. It is not in the cold halls of cleverness where celebrities seem to be important that we should look for the great. An intellectual salon is merely a training-ground for one faculty, and is akin to a fencing class or a rifle corps. It is in our own homes and environments, from Croydon to St. John’s Wood, in old nurses, and gentlemen with hobbies, and talkative spinsters and vast incomparable butlers, that we may feel the presence of that blood of the gods. And this creature so hard to describe, so easy to remember, the august and memorable fool, has never been so sumptuously painted as in the Bottom of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Bottom has the supreme mark of this real greatness in that like the true saint or the true hero he only differs from humanity in being as it were more human than humanity. It is not true, as the idle materialists of today suggest, that compared to the majority of men the hero appears cold and dehumanised; it is the majority who appear cold and dehumanised in the presence of greatness. Bottom, like Don Quixote. and Uncle Toby and Mr. Richard Swiveller and the rest of the Titans, has a huge and unfathomable weakness, his silliness is on a great scale, and when he blows his own trumpet it is like the trumpet of the Resurrection. The other rustics in the play accept his leadership not merely naturally but exuberantly; they have to the full that primary and savage unselfishness, that uproarious abnegation which makes simple men take pleasure in falling short of a hero, that unquestionable element of basic human nature which has never been expressed, outside this play, so perfectly as in the incomparable chapter at the beginning of Evan Harrington in which the praises of The Great Mel are sung with a lyric energy by the tradesmen whom he has cheated. Twopenny sceptics write of the egoism of primal human nature; it is reserved for great men like Shakespeare and Meredith to detect and make vivid this rude and subconscious unselfishness which is older than self. They alone with their insatiable tolerance can perceive all the spiritual devotion in the soul of a snob. And it is this natural play between the rich simplicity of Bottom and the simple simplicity of his comrades which constitutes the unapproachable excellence of the farcical scenes in this play. Bottom’s sensibility to literature is perfectly fiery and genuine, a great deal more genuine than that of a great many cultivated critics of literature—“the raging rocks, and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison gates, and Phibbus’ car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish fates”, is exceedingly good poetical diction with a real throb and swell in it, and if it is slightly and almost imperceptibly deficient in the matter of sense, it is certainly every bit as sensible as a good many other rhetorical speeches in Shakespeare put into the mouths of kings and lovers and even the spirits of the dead. If Bottom liked cant for its own sake the fact only constitutes another point of sympathy between him and his literary creator. But the style of the thing, though deliberately bombastic and ludicrous, is quite literary, the alliteration falls like wave upon wave, and the whole verse, like a billow mounts higher and higher before it crashes. There is nothing mean about this folly; nor is there in the whole realm of literature a figure so free from vulgarity. The man vitally base and foolish sings “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”; he does not rant about “raging rocks” and “the car of Phibbus”. Dickens, who more perhaps than any modern man had the mental hospitality and the thoughtless wisdom of Shakespeare, perceived and expressed admirably the same truth. He perceived, that is to say, that quite indefensible idiots have very often a real sense of, and enthusiasm for letters. Mr. Micawber loved eloquence and poetry with his whole immortal soul; words and visionary pictures kept him alive in the absence of food and money, as they might have kept a saint fasting in a desert. Dick Swiveller did not make his inimitable quotations from Moore and Byron merely as flippant digressions. He made them because he loved a great school of poetry. The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman. And the triumph of Bottom is that he loves rhetoric and his own taste in the arts, and this is all that can be achieved by Theseus, or for the matter of that by Cosimo di Medici. It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism.
There is another aspect of this great play which ought to be kept familiarly in the mind. Extravagant as is the masquerade of the story, it is a very perfect aesthetic harmony down to such coup-de-maître as the name of Bottom, or the flower called Love in Idleness. In the whole matter it may be said that there is one accidental discord; that is in the name of Theseus, and the whole city of Athens in which the events take place. Shakespeare’s description of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the best description of England that he or any one else ever wrote. Theseus is quite obviously only an English squire, fond of hunting, kindly to his tenants, hospitable with a certain flamboyant vanity. The mechanics are English mechanics, talking to each other with the queer formality of the poor. Above all, the fairies are English; to compare them with the beautiful patrician spirits of Irish legend, for instance, is suddenly to discover that we have, after all, a folk-lore and a mythology, or had it at least in Shakespeare’s day. Robin Goodfellow, upsetting the old women’s ale, or pulling the stool from under them, has nothing of the poignant Celtic beauty; his is the horse-play of the invisible world. Perhaps it is some debased inheritance of English life which makes American ghosts so fond of quite undignified practical jokes. But this union of mystery with farce is a note of the medieval English. The play is the last glimpse of Merrie England, that distant but shining and quite indubitable country. It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase “merrie England”, though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism. Amid all the great work of Puritanism the damning indictment of it consists in one fact, that there was one only of the fables of Christendom that it retained and renewed, and that was the belief in witchcraft. It cast away the generous and wholesome superstition, it approved only of the morbid and the dangerous. In their treatment of the great national fairy-tale of good and evil, the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon, And this seventeenth-century tradition of dealing with the psychic life still lies like a great shadow over England and America, so that if we glance at a novel about occultism we may be perfectly certain that it deals with sad or evil destiny. Whatever else we expect we certainly should never expect to find in it spirits such as those in Aylwin as inspirers of a tale of tomfoolery like the Wrong Box or The Londoners. That impossibility is the disappearance of “merrie England” and Robin Goodfellow. It was a land to us incredible, the land of a jolly occultism where the peasant cracked jokes with his patron saint, and only cursed the fairies good-humouredly, as he might curse a lazy servant. Shakespeare is English in everything, above all in his weaknesses. Just as London, one of the greatest cities in the world, shows more slums and hides more beauties than any other, so Shakespeare alone among the four giants of poetry is a careless writer, and lets us come upon his splendours by accident, as we come upon an old City church in the twist of a city street. He is English in nothing so much as in that noble cosmopolitan unconsciousness which makes him look eastward with the eyes of a child towards Athens or Verona. He loved to talk of the glory of foreign lands, but he talked of them with the tongue and unquenchable spirit of England. It is too much the custom of a later patriotism to reverse this method and talk of England from morning till night, but to talk of her in a manner totally un-English. Casualness, incongruities, and a certain fine absence of mind are in the temper of England; the unconscious man with the ass’s head is no bad type of the people. Materialistic philosophers and mechanical politicians have certainly succeeded in some cases in giving him a greater unity. The only question is, to which animal has he been thus successfully conformed?
ON READING
The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone. The way in which it does this, however, is sufficiently curious to be worth our fully understanding it to begin with.
From time to time in human history, but especially in restless epochs like our own, a certain class of things appears. In the old world they were called heresies. In the modern world they are called fads. Sometimes they are for a time useful; sometimes they are wholly mischievous. But they always consist of undue concentration upon some one truth or half-truth. Thus it is true to insist upon God’s knowledge, but heretical to insist on it as Calvin did at the expense of his Love; thus it is true to desire a simple life, but heretical to desire it at the expense of good feeling and good manners. The heretic (who is also the fanatic) is not a man who loves truth too much; no man can love truth too much. The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself. He prefers the half-truth that he has found to the whole truth which humanity has found. He does not like to see his own precious little paradox merely bound up with twenty truisms into the bundle of the wisdom of the world.
Sometimes such innovators are of a sombre sincerity like Tolstoi, sometimes of a sensitive and feminine eloquence like Nietzsche, and sometimes of an admirable humour, pluck, and public spirit like Mr. Bernard Shaw. In all cases they make a stir, and perhaps found a school. But in all cases the same fundamental mistake is made. It is always supposed that the man in question has discovered a new idea. But, as a fact, what is new is not the idea, but only the isolation of the idea. The idea itself can be found, in all probability, scattered frequently enough through all the great books of a more classic or impartial temper, from Homer and Virgil to Fielding and Dickens. You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.
In case this point is not clear, I will take two examples, both in reference to notions fashionable among some of the more fanciful and younger theorists. Nietzsche, as every one knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea. It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past, say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads. Turn up the last act of Shakespeare’s Richard III and you will find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines, but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche. Richard Crookback says to his nobles:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
As I have said, the fact is plain. Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick; a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them. They thought of them; only they did not think much of them. It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea; he saw it, and he saw through it.
I will take one other example: Mr. Bernard Shaw in his striking and sincere play called “Major Barbara”, throws down one of the most violent of his verbal challenges to proverbial morality. People say, “Poverty is no crime.” “Yes,” says Mr. Bernard Shaw, “poverty is a crime, and the mother of crimes. It is a crime to be poor if you could possibly rebel or grow rich. To be poor means to be poor-spirited, servile or tricky.” Mr. Shaw shows signs of an intention to concentrate on this doctrine, and many of his followers do the same. Now, it is only the concentration that is new, not the doctrine. Thackeray makes Becky Sharp say that it is easy to be moral on £1,000 a year, and so difficult on £100. But, as in the case of Shakespeare I have quoted, the point is not merely that Thackeray knew of this conception, but that he knew exactly what it was worth. It not only occurred to him, but he knew where it ought to occur. It ought to occur in the conversation of Becky Sharp; a woman shrewd and not without sincerity, but profoundly unacquainted with all the deeper emotions which make life worth living. The cynicism of Becky, with Lady Jane and Dobbin to balance it, has a certain breezy truth. The cynicism of Mr. Shaw’s Undershaft, preached alone with the austerity of a field preacher, is simply not true at all. It is simply not true at all to say that the very poor are as a whole more insincere or more grovelling than the very rich. Becky’s half-truth has become first a crotchet, then a creed, and then a lie. In the case of Thackeray, as in that of Shakespeare, the conclusion which concerns us is the same. What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas. It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare’s head; it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock the nonsense out of it.
MONSTERS AND THE MIDDLE AGES
I do not remember to have read anywhere an adequate and comprehensive account of the fabulous monsters so much written of in the Middle Ages. Such studies as I have seen suffered from the three or four strange and senseless blunders which throttle all our thought on such subjects. The primary blunder, of course, is that comic one to which students like Mr. Frazer have lent, or rather pawned, their authority. I mean the absurd notion that in matters of the imagination men have any need to copy from each other. Poems and poetic tales tend to be a little alike, not because Hebrews were really Chaldeans, nor because Christians were really Pagans, but because men are really men. Because there is, in spite of all the trend of modern thought, such a thing as man and the brotherhood of men. Anyone who has really looked at the moon might have called the moon a virgin and a huntress without ever having heard of Diana. Anyone who had ever looked at the sun might call it the god of oracles and of healing without having heard of Apollo. A man in love, walking about in a garden, compares a woman to a flower, and not to an earwig; though an earwig also was made by God, and has many superiorities to flowers in point of education and travel. To hear some people talk, one would think that the love of flowers had been imposed by some long priestly tradition, and the love of earwigs forbidden by some fearful tribal taboo.
The second great blunder is to suppose that such fables, even when they really are borrowed from older sources, are used in an old tired and customary spirit. When the soul really wakes it always deals directly with the nearest things. If, let us say, a man woke up in bed from a celestial dream which told him to go on painting till all was blue, he would begin by painting himself blue, then his bed blue, and so on. But he would be using all the machinery that came to hand; and that is exactly what always happens in real spiritual revolutions. They work by their environment even when they alter it.
Thus, when professors tell us that the Christians “borrowed” this or that fable or monster from the heathens, it is as if people said that a bricklayer had “borrowed” his bricks from clay, or a chemist had “borrowed” his explosives from chemicals; or that the Gothic builders of Lincoln or Beauvais had “borrowed” the pointed arch from the thin lattices of the Moors. Perhaps they did borrow it, but (by heaven!) they paid it back.
Five or six other similar errors need not detain us now. For upon these two rests the essential error about, let us say, unicorns; which, after all, is our chief affair in life. The mystical monsters talked of in the Middle Ages had most of them, no doubt, a tradition older than Christianity. I do not admit this because many of the most eminent authorities would say so. As Swinburne said in his conversation with Persephone, “I have lived long enough to have known one thing”; that eminent men mean successful men, and that successful men really hate Christianity. But it is evident from the general tradition of life and letters. I think that someone in the Old Testament says that the unicorn is a very difficult animal to catch; and certainly it has not been caught yet. If nobody has yet said that in this case “unicorn” must mean rhinoceros, somebody soon will, but it shall not be I. But though it is probably true that many of these medieval monsters were of pagan origin, this truth, which is always repeated, is far less startling than another truth that is always ignored.
The monster of the pagan fables was always, so far as I can see, an emblem of evil. That is to say, he was really a monster; he was abnormal; or as Kingsley put it in those fine and highly heathen hexameters:
Twi-formed strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers. Vainly rebelling, they rage till they die by the swords of the heroes.
Sometimes the monster, once killed, could be used to kill other monsters; as Perseus used the Gorgon to kill the dragons of the sea. But this is a mere accident of material. I can imagine, in the same way, that if I could put the head of a folk-lore professor on the end of a stick, in the French Revolutionary manner, it might serve very excellently as a heavy wooden club for beating in the heads of other and less hardened folk-lore professors. Or, again, the hydra, which grew two heads for every one that was cut off, might have been praised as an emblem of branching evolution and the advantage of an increasing population. But, as a fact, the hydra was not praised. He was killed, amid general relief. The minotaur might have been admired by moderns as the meeting-place of men and animals; the chimera might have been admired by moderns as an instance of the principle that three heads are better than one. I say that the hydra and chimera might have been admired by moderns. But they were not admired by ancients. Among the pagans the grotesque, fabulous animal was thought of only as something you ought to kill. Sometimes it killed you, like the sphinx; but even when it had done that, you did not really love it.
Now the case of the reappearance of such unearthly animals after Europe became Christendom is the thing I have never seen properly described. In one of the oldest of the legends of St. George and the Dragon, St. George did not kill the Dragon, but led it captive and sprinkled it with holy water. Something of the same sort happened to that whole department of the human mind which creates violent and unnatural images. Take the griffin for example. In our time the griffin, like most other medieval symbols, has been made a mean and farcical thing for fancy-dress balls: in twenty pictures from Punch, for instance, we can see the griffin and the turtle as supporters of the civic arms of London. For the modern “citizen” the arrangement is excellent; the griffin, which eats him, does not exist; the turtle, which he eats, does exist. But not only was the griffin not always trivial, but he was not always even bad. He was a mystical incorporation of two animals held wholly sacred: the lion of St. Mark, the lion of generosity, valour, victory; the eagle of St. John, the eagle of truth, of aspiration, of intellectual liberty. Thus the griffin was often used as the emblem of Christ; as combining the eagle and the lion in that mysterious and complete compound in which Christ combined the divine and human. But even if you thought of the griffin as good, you were not less afraid of him. Perhaps more.
But the strongest case is that of the unicorn, which I intended to figure prominently in this article but which seems to have evaded my thought in a most miraculous manner, and which up to this time I seem to have practically omitted. He is a terrible creature, the unicorn; and though he seems to live rather vaguely in Africa, I could never be surprised if he came walking up one of the four white roads that lead to Beaconsfield; the monster whiter than the roads, and his horn higher than the church spire. For all these mystical animals were imagined as enormously big as well as incalculably fierce and free. The stamping of the awful unicorn would shake the endless deserts in which it dwelt; and the wings of the vast griffin went over one’s head in heaven with the thunder of a thousand cherubim. And yet the fact remains that if you had asked a medieval man what the unicorn was supposed to mean, he would have replied “chastity”.
When we have understood that fact we shall understand a great many other things, but above all the civilisation out of which we come. Christianity did not conceive Christian virtues as tame, timid, and respectable things. It did conceive of these virtues as vast, defiant, and even destructive things, scorning the yoke of this world, dwelling in the desert, and seeking their meat from God. Till we have understood that no one will really understand even the “Lion and the Unicorn” over a pastry cook’s shop.
WHAT NOVELISTS ARE FOR
A long time ago, when I happened to be living in Rye in Sussex, I had the honour of being visited by two very distinguished men; they were both Americans, indeed, they were brothers; but the type of their success seemed oddly different. One was Henry James, the novelist, who lived next door; the other was William James, the philosopher, who had just crossed the Atlantic and seemed as breezy as the sea. In fact, there was an almost fantastic contrast between the two men: the one so solemn about social details often considered trivial; the other so hearty about abstract studies generally considered dry. Henry James talked about toast and teacups with the impressiveness of a family ghost; while William James talked about the metabolism and the involution of values with the air of a man recounting his flirtations on the steamer. But though I had and have the greatest possible regard for them both, I cannot but think that a certain relative completeness, and incompleteness, in the contrast between them reveals a certain truth about two different types of letters.
I was recently rereading one of the late Harvey Wickham’s exceedingly clever studies of modern thought; including the study of William James. I think the critic was mainly just about the philosophy, but not quite just about the philosopher. I do not myself think that Pragmatism can ever stand up as a serious rival to the permanent philosophy of Truth and the Absolute. But I do think that William James did really stand up as a rattling good fighter and cleaner-up of the particular sort of solemn nonsense most current in his time. He may have only indirectly served the cause of belief in belief. But he did a lot to serve the cause of unbelief in unbelief; a very wholesome object. But that is not my main point. It seems to me that where William James failed was exactly where Henry James succeeded; in making a whole scheme out of fine shades and doubtful cases. Now that can be done with a novel; for it only claims to be exceptional. It cannot be done with philosophy; for it must claim to be universal.
Pragmatism fails because it is a cosmos made out of odds and ends. But stories are better for being made out of odds and ends; especially if the ends are very odd. Recalling at random some Henry James stories, there was one about an intelligent youth who unaccountably became a sort of tame cat in the house of a couple of rich but unspeakably dull people. But it is not because he is a snob or a plate-licker; but because he is really touched by a devotion and delusion of the old couple, about their dead daughter, whose life they continue in a sort of waking dream, in which the young man figures as her lover. It is beautifully and delicately done; and it does not seem impossible. Now if we apply to this any moral philosophy on earth, however modern, however mad, we shall all shrink from laying it down as a general rule that young men ought to cadge on old men, that they ought to encourage delusions; that this ménage is a model for the normal home. But that is exactly what a novelist is for. He is not bound to justify human beings, but only to humanise them. It is for him and not the philosopher to deal with all this chapter of accidents; in which “things work out differently in practice”. William James’s mistake was that he did not put his notions into novels, like his brother; where such opportunism is quite appropriate. He tried to make a cosmic system out of these accidents and this opportunism; and the system is not systematic. The comparison carries a faint hint that novelists may be some use after all.
THE SONG OF ROLAND
MOST OF us remember reading, in the school histories of our childhood, that at the Battle of Hastings Taillefer the Jongleur went in front of the Norman Army, throwing his sword in the air and singing the Song of Roland. They were naturally histories of a very Victorian sort, which passed lightly over the Roman Empire and the Crusades on the way to serious things, such as the genealogy of George I or the administration of Addington. But that one image emerged in the imagination as something alive in its dead surroundings; like finding a familiar face in a faded tapestry. The song he sang was presumably not the noble and rugged epic which Major Scott Moncrieff has done so solid and even historic a service to letters in rendering in its entirety. The Jongleur must at least have selected extracts or favourite passages, or the battles would have been unduly delayed. But the tale has the same moral as the translation; since both have the same inspiration. The value of the tale was that it did suggest to the childish mind, through all the deadening effects of distance and indifference, that a man does not make such a gesture with a sword unless he feels something, and that a man does not sing unless he has something to sing about. Dull avarice and an appetite for feudal lands do not inspire such jugglery. In short the value of the tale was that it hinted that there is a heart in history, even remote history. And the value of the translation is that if we are really to learn history we must, in a double sense of the word, learn it by heart. We must learn it at length and as it were at large; lingering over chance spaces of contemporary work, for love of its detail, and one might almost say for love of its dullness. Even a random reader like myself, only dipping here and there into such things, so long as they are really things of the period, can often learn more from them than from the most careful constitutional digests or political summaries by modern men more learned than himself. A modern man, educated on the modern histories, may find here the things he does not expect. I have here only space for one example, out of many that I could give to show what I mean. Most of the stock histories tell the young student something of what Feudalism was in legal form and custom; that the subordinates were called vassals, that they did homage, and so on. But they do it somehow in such a way as to suggest a savage and sullen obedience; as if a vassal were no more than a serf. What is left out is the fact that the homage really was homage; a thing worthy of a man. The first feudal feeling had something ideal and even impersonal, like patriotism. The nations were not yet born; and these smaller groups had almost the soul of nations. The reader will find the word “vassalage” used again and again on a note which is not only heroic but even haughty. The vassal is obviously as proud of being a vassal as anybody could be of being a lord. Indeed the feudal poet uses the word “vassalage” where a modern poet would use the word “chivalry”. The Paladins charging the Paynim are spurred on by vassalage. Turpin the Archbishop hacks the Moslem chieftain rib from rib; and the Christians, beholding his triumph, cry aloud in their pride that he has shown great vassalage; and that with such an Archbishop the Cross is safe. There were no Conscientious Objections in their Christianity.
This is a type of the truths that historical literature ought to make us feel; but which mere histories very seldom do. The one example I have already given, of the Jongleur at Hastings, is a complexity of curious truths that might be conveyed and which very seldom are. We might have learned, for instance, what a Jongleur was; and realised that this one may have had feelings as deep and fantastic as the Jongleur celebrated in the twelfth-century poem, who died gloriously of dancing and turning somersaults before the image of Our Lady; that he was of the trade taken as a type by the mystical mirth of St. Francis, who called his monks the Jugglers of God. A man must read at least a little of the contemporary work itself before he thus finds the human heart inside the armour and the monastic gown; the men who write the philosophy of history seldom give us the philosophy, still less the religion, of the historical characters. And the final example of this is something which is also illustrated by the obscure minstrel who threw up his sword as he sang the Song of Roland, as well as by the Song of Roland itself. Modern history, mainly ethnological or economic, always talks of a thing like the Norman adventure in the somewhat vulgar language of success, but it is well to note, in the real Norman story, that the very bard in front of their battle-line was shouting the glorification of failure. It testifies to a truth in the very heart of Christendom that even the court poet of William the Conqueror was celebrating Roland the conquered.
That high note of the forlorn hope, of a host at bay and a battle against odds without end, is the note on which the great French epic ends. I know nothing more moving in poetry than that strange and unexpected end; that splendidly inconclusive conclusion. Charlemagne, the great Christian emperor, has at last established his empire in quiet, has done justice almost in the manner of a day of judgment, and sleeps as it were upon his throne with a peace almost like that of Paradise. And there appears to him the angel of God crying aloud that his arms are needed in a new and distant land, and that he must take up again the endless march of his days. And the great king tears his long white beard and cries out against his restless life. The poem ends, as it were with a vision and vista of wars against the barbarians; and the vision is true. For that war is never ended which defends the sanity of the world against all the stark anarchies and rending negations which rage against it for ever. That war is never finished in this world; and the grass has hardly grown on the graves of our own friends who fell in it.
THE SUPERSTITION OF SCHOOL
It is an error to suppose that advancing years bring retrogressing opinions. In other words, it is not true that men growing old must be growing reactionary. Some of the difficulties of recent times have been due to the obstinate optimism of the old revolutionary. Magnificent old men like Kropotkin and Whitman and William Morris went to their graves expecting Utopia if they did not expect Heaven. But the falsehood, like so many falsehoods, is a false version of a half-truth. The truth, or half-truth, is not that men must learn by experience to be reactionaries; but that they must learn by experience to expect reactions. And when I say reactions I mean reactions; I must apologise, in the world of current culture, for using the word in its correct sense.
If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man’s ideals that change it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, “You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older”, says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.
These are the snags of sociology; and one of them concerned with Education. If you ask me whether I think the populace, especially the poor, should be recognised as citizens who can rule the state, I answer in a voice of thunder, “Yes”. If you ask me whether I think they ought to have education, in the sense of a wide culture and familiarity with the classics of history, I again answer, “Yes”. But there is, in the achievement of this purpose, a sort of snag or recoil that can only be discovered by experience and does not appear in print at all. It is not allowed for on paper, even so much as is the recoil of a gun. Yet it is at this moment an exceedingly practical part of practical politics; and, while it has been a political problem for a very long time past, it is a little more marked (if I may stain these serene and impartial pages with so political a suggestion) under recent conditions that have brought so many highly respectable Socialists and widely respected Trade Union officials to the front.
The snag in it is this: that the self-educated think far too much of education. I might add that the half-educated always think everything of education. That is not a fact that appears on the surface of the social plan or ideal; it is the sort of thing that can only be discovered by experience. When I said that I wanted the popular feeling to find political expression, I meant the actual and autochthonous popular feeling as it can be found in third-class carriages and bean-feasts and bank-holiday crowds; and especially, of course (for the earnest social seeker after truth), in public-houses. I thought, and I still think, that these people are right on a vast number of things on which the fashionable leaders are wrong. The snag is that when one of these people begins to “improve himself” it is exactly at that moment that I begin to doubt whether it is an improvement. He seems to me to collect with remarkable rapidity a number of superstitions, of which the most blind and benighted is what may be called the Superstition of School. He regards School, not as a normal social institution to be fitted in to other social institutions, like Home and Church and State; but as some sort of entirely supernormal and miraculous moral factory, in which perfect men and women are made by magic. To this idolatry of School he is ready to sacrifice Home and History and Humanity, with all its instincts and possibilities, at a moment’s notice. To this idol he will make any sacrifice, especially human sacrifice. And at the back of the mind, especially of the best men of this sort, there is almost always one of two variants of the same concentrated conception: either “If I had not been to School I should not be the great man I am now”, or else “If I had been to school I should be even greater than I am”. Let none say that I am scoffing at uneducated people; it is not their uneducation but their education that I scoff at. Let none mistake this for a sneer at the half-educated; what I dislike is the educated half. But I dislike it, not because I dislike education, but because, given the modern philosophy or absence of philosophy, education is turned against itself, destroying that very sense of variety and proportion which it is the object of education to give. No man who worships education has got the best out of education; no man who sacrifices everything to education is even educated. I need not mention here the many recent examples of this monomania, rapidly turning into mad persecution, such as the ludicrous persecution of the families who live on barges. What is wrong is a neglect of principle; and the principle is that without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete.
I use the casual phrase casually; for I do not concern myself with the gentleman but with the citizen. Nevertheless, there is this historic half-truth in the case for aristocracy; that it is sometimes a little easier for the aristocrat, at his best, to have this last touch of culture which is a superiority to culture. Nevertheless, the truth of which I speak has nothing to do with any special culture of any special class. It has belonged to any number of peasants, especially when they were poets; it is this which gives a sort of natural distinction to Robert Burns and the peasant poets of Scotland. The power which produces it more effectively than any blood or breed is religion; for religion may be defined as that which puts the first things first. Robert Burns was justifiably impatient with the religion he inherited from Scottish Calvinism; but he owed something to his inheritance. His instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centred entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realise the stars.
THE ROMANCE OF A RASCAL
It was Thackeray, I think, somewhere in the dizzy mazes of his Roundabout Papers, who made a remark which throws some light on literary fashions and the fate of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. He described very vividly the fervour he felt as a boy for the Waverley Novels; and how those great romances filled the boyhood of those, like himself, who were to make the literature of that most romantic epoch which we call in England the Victorian era. He adds an interesting comment to this effect: “Our fathers used to talk about Peregrine Pickle, telling us (the sly old boys) that it was capital fun. But I think I was rather bewildered by it.”
That, I fear, may be the immediate effect upon many either of Thackeray’s period or even of our own period, where it has inherited the great literary tradition, which many learnt in youth from Thackeray, and which Thackeray learnt in youth from Scott. Most of those who grew up under such standards of fiction, as did the present writer, may be disposed to say at first that they find Smollett’s novel rather bewildering. Not quite so bewildering as some of the most modern novels, of course. But many people seem to have a singular literary test, by which they like being bewildered by a new book, but dislike being bewildered by an old one. As I shall point out presently, this is very largely because the new book is not so new as it pretends to be. And the old book is not so very old, as the real stages of history go. In short, the real moral of all these things is the astonishing rapidity with which moods and standards change and change again; often changing back from the third condition to the first. There is nothing so mystifying as the rapidity with which new literary methods harden, except the brittleness with which they break. Each traveller who turns the corner thinks it will lead him into a straight road of progress; but really it leads him, in about ten minutes, to another corner which turns into another and equally crooked road. The point about a book like Peregrine Pickle can be fixed fairly precisely, by considering what are the changes that separated him from Thackeray, or that separate Thackeray from us.
In that little phrase from the Roundabout Papers there are, to begin with, some interesting and even amusing points. For instance, we are always told that the Victorian parent, or, even more, the early nineteenth-century parent, was a Puritan who forbade his family the idle as well as the improper forms of light literature; a Heavy Father who sat very heavily even on ordinary love-stories or romantic plays. Even so eighteenth-century a type as Macaulay identified the opinion of most sober and responsible parents with so extraordinary a parent as Sir Anthony Absolute in the comic play. “A circulating library is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.” Even a modern so steeped in the eighteenth century as Mr. Max Beerbohm has described the typical papa of a generation that might well have been that of Thackeray’s papa, as a gloomy and ponderous person who talked to his children about nothing but Hell. Surely that one little glimpse from Thackeray’s own essays might lead one to guess that there is something wrong in all this. It is difficult to imagine the Puritan papa, who commonly talked about Hell, winding up with a recommendation to read Peregrine Pickle. It is difficult to suppose that a race of Sir Anthony Absolutes, disapproving of all novels, would have gone out of their way to select this novel, out of all earthly novels, on the ground that it was “capital fun”. The parent must have been a very sly old boy indeed if he really thrust Peregrine Pickle on the attention of a little boy, whose head was full of ideals of chivalry, like those of Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe.
The truth is that the elements were too mixed, and, above all, the fashions too fugitive, for any of these generalisations. Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions; but the conventions are more fleeting than fashions. There were papas who would have been almost as much shocked at their daughters reading Pride and Prejudice as at their reading Peregrine Pickle. But they were the papas and not the grand-papas. There was a sort of household where Hell was the brightest topic of chat; but it was not the old-fashioned household but rather the new-fashioned household. It came in with the Methodists, who were regarded as innovators and rebels. That episode of extreme severity, which was the beginning of the highly expurgated Victorian fiction, need not here be traced to its historical causes. Broadly speaking, it came from the rapid increase of wealth and power among the Nonconformists of the north, who vetoed the frankness both of the old gentry and the old peasantry of the south. The point here is that the work of these Puritans, from Lancashire or Yorkshire, was so very rapidly done that men forgot that it was so very recent. All this has to be understood before anybody, looking back through the nineteenth century, can do justice to the work of Smollett. The point of it is that not only did the changes come, but each generation accepted them as if they had always been unchangeable. Thus, in the case just mentioned, Thackeray began to write novels long after Dickens; he was still an artist, or art student, when he offered to illustrate Pickwick. Dickens, in the flood of his popularity that followed Pickwick, had already accepted and popularised what we call the Victorian conventions. This has been somewhat harshly expressed by Mr. Aldous Huxley when he said that a writer like Dickens writes as if he were a child, while a writer like Smollett writes as if he were a grown man. But indeed there is a considerable link between a writer like Smollett and a writer like Aldous Huxley. For the road has taken another sharp turn backwards; and the interlude of Victorian innocence is again out of sight. There is one instance of this, which dominates and largely explains the whole story of Peregrine Pickle.
When Thackeray called Vanity Fair “a novel without a hero”, or even when he made the relatively realistic Pendennis a novel with a rather unheroic hero, he was doubtless by that time so accustomed to Victorian fiction as to feel that he was doing something new, and even “cynical”. For Victorian fiction had already returned to the old romantic idea that the hero should be heroic, even if it did not understand him so well as did the old romances. Nicholas Nickleby vanquishes Squeers as St. George vanquishes the dragon; and John Ridd is a knight without fear or reproach, like Ivanhoe. But in fact Thackeray was only slightly reacting towards what had been universal in the time of that sly old boy, his papa.
All novels like Peregrine Pickle, all novels up to the time of Pickwick, were written frankly on a far more cynical convention: that the hero should not be heroic. The enterprising Mr. Pickle is certainly not heroic. He is many things that are good; not only brave, but often warm-hearted and considerate; and, above all, capable of recognising better men than himself. But, for the rest, by Victorian and even by normal standards, he is simply a coarse and rapacious rascal; nor does Smollett really pretend that he is anything else. This tendency to follow with delight the tricks and triumphs of somebody little better than a swindler comes from the historical origin of this type of story, which began in what is called the picaresque novel. It is the romance of a wanderer, apt to turn from the romance of a peddler to that of a highway robber. It is a curious coincidence that Smollett translated Gil Blas, in which this new cynical romance made its first triumph; and also translated Don Quixote, in which the road was cleared for it by the rout of the old romances which had made their heroes impossibly heroic. But about this sort of rambling tale, of the Romance of a Rascal, there are certain modern misunderstandings to be avoided. It would be complete misunderstanding of men like Tobias Smollett to suppose that because the heroes are immoral the authors are even unmoral. It is a peculiar characteristic of all that stalwart school, which represented this picaresque element in England that they do believe in heroism for anybody except heroes. Both in Fielding and Smollett and others we find a sort of fixed habit of thought, by which virtue is represented, and is even preached, and is often preached vehemently and in terms of authority; but never by the principal character, who is a young man of the world apparently not expected either to preach it or to practise it. Parson Adams is a serious picture of a good man, and Joseph Andrews is only a bad joke; but Joseph gives his name to the book. Fielding is more concerned with Tom Jones than with Alworthy; but be agrees with Mr. Alworthy and not with Tom Jones. And if anyone wishes to note exactly how this habit expresses itself in Smollett, let him turn to the typical scene in which Peregrine Pickle provokes a duel with Mr. Gauntlet. By all possible standards Peregrine is to behave like a vulgar and low-minded cad, actually sneering at the poverty of the soldier whom he has insulted, and being ignominiously defeated by the man he has so coarsely despised. Certainly no Victorian romancer would have dragged his hero through the mud of such a meeting. And yet the whole incident brings out in glowing colours all that is really good and lovable about Peregrine Pickle. He does vividly realise that the other man is more virtuous than himself; he acts as impetuously on the moral as on the immoral impulse;. he apologises after defeat, which is more difficult than apologising before it. In other words, Mr. Gauntlet, like Parson Adams, stands for something fixed and recognised; a virtue which the other characters venerate even while they violate. In this incident Peregrine is represented in the course of an hour or so as behaving almost incredibly badly and then almost incredibly well; and yet it is quite credible. Why do we thus feel that there is something solid in it after all? First, no doubt, because Smollett was a real novelist, and the character of Peregrine Pickle was a real character. He does convey what later sentiment would have called the contradiction: that Peregrine was a scoundrel, but a warm-hearted scoundrel; that lie was very near to being a swindler, but always an impetuous swindler. But it is due, almost as much, to the sense of firmness produced by the fact that vice and virtue are still treated as facts. Our sense of sincerity is founded on the fact that Tobias Smollett, as well as Peregrine Pickle, did really believe in right and wrong, and thought the principal character wrong and the secondary character right.
It is here that we find the chief difference between old writers like Smollett and many modern writers who set themselves successfully to produce the same convincing smell of dirt, the same unmistakable ugliness in the details of life, the same slippery and sometimes slimy irresponsibility about sex, the same heroic persistency in avoiding heroism. The difference is that Smollett’s hero, or villain, does know exactly where he is in the moral world, even if it is where he ought not to be. The modern adventurer of the same type occupies all his adventures in trying to discover where he is. He is not so much breaking laws with bravery and cunning, as trying to learn the laws, with constant bewilderment and despair. Virtue does not rebuke him; the best that can be said for him is that vice generally bores him. Therefore he is not wholly successful in copying the older writers in their two gifts of lucidity and grossness; because he lacks the third angle of the triangle: their confidence.
Considered as a series of chapters, Peregrine Pickle is simply a chapter of accidents. Curiously enough the splash it made in its own day, especially in the sparkling world of wit and fashion, was almost entirely due to what almost anybody would now call the dullest part of the book. The insertion called “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” was supposed to have some scandalous allusiveness to aristocratic society at the time; but it is not typical of the author, or even of the book. Nor can we in practice class this patchy and parenthetical style with the similar irregularity of a book like Pickwick. Most people, at least most mature people, have read Pickwick. Comparatively few, even among the most aged people, have read Peregrine Pickle. There cannot be very many sly old boys still going about the street, and advising modern youth to read it and find it capital fun. To many it must now be introduced as a new book rather than an old one; and the method of approach is sharply divergent. In writing of Dickens, we are writing for our fellow Dickensians, and can prove any point or illustrate any theory by examples they know as well as we. I do not think it is unfair to say that if I were to begin by referring the average reader to the well-known attitude of Mr. Metaphor, or the incident of Mr. Hornbeck, he would hardly be so suddenly illumined as by a reference to Mr. Stiggins or Mr. Weller. In cases like this, where an historic work by a man of genius is not now widely popular, or in immediate contact with the reading public, the cause and the problem can almost always be found in certain changes of taste which, rapid as they are, do correspond largely to changes of ideas. A man who opens Peregrine Pickle must not expect what he gets from a good Victorian novel, or a good modern novel; and only by some explanation of principles can he ever discover that it may contain things quite as good. It is well, therefore, to emphasise some general qualities that are even better. The novel of Smollett’s time was better than the novel of the Victorian time, in so far as it recognised more clearly that good and evil exist and are entangled even in the same man. The novel of Smollett’s time was better than the novel of our own time, in so far as it recognised that, even when they are entangled in the same man, they can still be distinguished and are very different, and at war till death.
PAYING FOR PATRIOTISM
Somebody was recently remonstrating with me in connection with certain remarks that I have made touching the history of English misgovernment in Ireland. The criticism, like many others, was to the effect that these are only old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago; that the present generation is not responsible for them; that there is, as the critic said, no way in which he or I could have assisted or prevented them; that if anyone was to blame, he had gone to his account; and we are not to blame at all. There was mingled with his protest, I think, a certain suggestion that an Englishman is lacking in patriotism when he resurrects such corpses in order to connect them with crime.
Now the queer thing is this: that I think it is I who am standing up for the principle of patriotism; and I think it is he who is denying it. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few people left, of my own sort and calling, who do still believe in patriotism; just as I am among the few who do still believe in democracy. Both these ideas, were exaggerated extravagantly and, what is worse, erroneously, or entirely in the wrong way, during the nineteenth century; but the reaction against them today is very strong, especially among the intellectuals. But I do believe that patriotism rests on a psychological truth; a social sympathy with those of our own sort, whereby we see our own potential acts in them; and understand their history from within. But if there truly be such a thing as a nation, that truth is a two-edged sword, and we must let it out both ways.
Therefore I answer my critic thus. It is quite true that it was not I, G. K. Chesterton, who pulled the beard of an Irish chieftain by way of social introduction; it was John Plantagenet, afterwards King John; and I was not present. It was not I, but a much more distinguished literary gent, named Edmund Spenser, who concluded on the whole that the Irish had better be exterminated like vipers; nor did he even ask my advice on so vital a point. I never stuck a pike through an Irish lady for fun, after the siege of Drogheda, as did the God-fearing Puritan soldiers of Oliver Cromwell. Nobody can find anything in my handwriting that contributes to the original drafting of the Penal Laws; and it is a complete mistake to suppose that I was called to the Privy Council when it decided upon the treacherous breaking of the Treaty of Limerick. I never put a pitchcap on an Irish rebel in my life; and there was not a single one of the thousand floggings of ‘98 which I inflicted or even ordered. If that is what is meant, it is not very difficult to see that it is quite true.
But it is equally true that I did not ride with Chaucer to Canterbury, and give him a few intelligent hints for the best passages in The Canterbury Tales. It is equally true that there was a large and lamentable gap in the company seated at the Mermaid; that scarcely a word of Shakespeare’s most poetical passages was actually contributed by me; that I did not whisper to him the word “incarnadine” when he was hesitating after “multitudinous seas”; that I entirely missed the opportunity of suggesting that Hamlet would be effectively ended by the stormy entrance of Fortinbras. Nay, aged and infirm as I am, it were vain for me to pretend that I lost a leg at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that I am old enough to have seen (as I should like to have seen), ablaze with stars upon the deck of death, the frail figure and the elvish face of the noblest sailor of history.
Yet I propose to go on being proud of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Nelson; to feel that the poets did indeed love the language that I love and that the sailor felt something of what we also feel for the sea. But if we accept this mystical corporate being, this larger self, we must accept it for good and ill. If we boast of our best, we must repent of our worst. Otherwise patriotism will be a very poor thing indeed.
THE PANTOMIME
Mr. Maurice Baring, the chief Puppet-Master of the Puppet-Show of Memory, has included in a recent reprint, I am glad to see, an item that I have loved long since and lost awhile, in the form of a scene from the old Drury Lane sort of Harlequinade, recast in the manner of the mystical plays of Maeterlinck. It was probably written when Maeterlinck was very much the fashion, and when people had long been saying that the Harlequinade was hopelessly old-fashioned. In one sense it would be difficult to say which of the two is more old-fashioned now. But, to judge by current criticism and conversation, there are many who remember Pantaloon and Harlequin who hardly even remember Pélleas and Mélisande. It is a queer thing to note the extent to which the world has become silent about Maeterlinck; though it may be the more impressive to the remaining followers of so eloquent an admirer of silence. Whatever be the cause, it certainly was not that his work was devoid of a very individual imaginative quality. Personally, I should guess that he had shared the fate of many modern attempts to refound mysticism on something less real rather than something more real than this world. But the matter only arises here in relation to this little literary jest about the Pantomime, which I always felt to be one of Mr. Baring’s most charming fancies. Of course it is a very good burlesque of Maeterlinck; it is also in a sense a very good burlesque of the Pantomime; and the latter is the more delicate achievement. Every healthy person wishes to make fun of a serious thing; but it is generally almost impossible to make fun of a funny thing. But in this case the notion of fun or burlesque must not be confused in either case with any idea of hostility, or even of satire. Parody does not consist merely of contrast; at its best it rather consists of a superficial contrast covering a substantial congruity. The bitter sort of burlesque may exist, and have a right to exist; but it is doubtful whether in this particular form the bitterest is the best. The one sort of parodist will naturally parody the sort of style he dislikes. But the other sort of parodist will always prefer to parody the style he likes. I remember in my boyhood, when Swinburne was our (rather too bubbly) champagne, I for one wrote almost as many conscious travesties of Swinburne as unconscious copies of him.
Now in this case of the Pantomime the paradox has a sort of moral. For I know that the real reason why I return with unwearied joy to Mr. Baring’s little Maeterlinckian Harlequinade is because the atmosphere of the harlequinade really was for me, if not exactly Maeterlinckian, at least in some mysterious sense mystical. I need not dwell on the points in the parody which were witty considered as contrasts as well as coincidences. The policeman repeats at intervals, like the tolling of a funeral bell (a lost and wandering bell attached to no church and uttering in its hollow throat an awful agnosticism), “It was not on my beat.” The Pantaloon, one of the shivering old men of Maeterlinck, babbles not of green fields but of grey and ghostly sausages, as of things he will never find, or is not certain that he ever did find. But my point here is that, in spite of the comic contrast between the hilarity of the Pantomime and the hopelessness of the Maeterlinckian atmosphere, there really is something that, for me at least, melts the two into a sort of mystical unity; so that the top-heavy house of the Harlequinade is even here like my home. For I am quite certain, as a fact of psychology, that I did even in childhood regard the knockabout part of the Pantomime with its pokers and sausages, as being none the less a poetical part of the Pantomime; and as unmistakably within the frontiers of fairyland as the palace of the Fairy Queen. Never on earthly anvil, never in earthly fireplace, did that red poker gleam: never those clattering milkcans brim with an earthly cream. The Policeman was perfectly right about both scenes and in both senses. He was not on his beat. He was a stray and estranged policeman; a policeman stolen by the fairies; a constable wandering far away from his constabulary duties, if he ever had any. The joke depended on the very Victorian accident that the costume of a London policeman seemed both commonplace and comic; and yet, although he was comic, he was not really commonplace. He was not merely befooled but bewitched; and his blue uniform revisited the glimpses of a blue moon. Still, it is curious to reflect how completely different the whole drama would have seemed if he had been any sort of foreign gendarme, with a cocked hat and a sword.
Now my interest in the matter is this; that I know many will say that this sense of glamour is an effect of distance, like the colour of blue hills or crimson clouds; and that in this romantic aspect it is only a puppet-show of memory. They would say that I saw it in this mystical manner through the intervening veils of time, through the mists of Maeterlinck, through the mockeries of Mr. Baring, and, above all, through that depth of delicate melancholy with which the remote past is remembered. But I am certain that this is not so. Apart from the fact that the memory of childish joys does not make me melancholy (it is perhaps a fine shade of theology) and apart from the fact that I suspect that Mr. Baring himself remembers the thing very much as I do, I am quite sure that I am remembering a reality that was real then as well as now. You could as soon persuade me that the taste of toffee was an illusion that only came to me in later years, or that I think I liked roast chestnuts then only because I like them now, as convince me that I did not have, even as a child, an overwhelming impression that this farcical world was fantastic, not merely in the sense of being comic, but also in the sense of being mystic. Though the scene might superficially seem completely constructed out of objects made as much as possible prosaic, I had an instant inward certainty that they were all poetic. The sky above those staggering chimneys was not the sky above the chimneys in the street outside; its stars would have been strange stars; for I had looked round another corner of the cosmos. To wander in the streets of that strange town would have been as unearthly an experience as to wander in the Blue Forest round Bluebeard’s Sapphire Palace, or along the Golden Orange-Groves in the gardens of Prester John. Not verbally, but quite vividly, I knew then, exactly as I know now, that there is something mysterious and perhaps more than mortal about the power and call of imagination. I do not think this early experience has been quite rightly understood, even by those modern writers who have written the most charming and fanciful studies of childhood; and I am not so presumptuous as to think that I can scientifically succeed where I think they have somehow vaguely failed. But I have often fancied that it might be worth while to set down a few notes or queries about this difficult and distant impression. For one thing, the ordinary phrases used about childish fancies often strike me as missing the mark, and being in some subtle way, quite misleading. For instance, there is the very popular phrase, “Make-believe.” This seems to imply that the mind makes itself believe something; or else that it first makes something and then forces itself to believe in it, or to believe something about it. I do not think there is even this slight crack of falsity in the crystal clearness and directness of the child’s vision of a fairy-palace— or a fairy-policeman. In one sense the child believes much less, and in another much more than that. I do not think the child is deceived; or that he attempts for a moment to deceive himself. I think he instantly asserts his direct and divine right to enjoy beauty; that he steps straight into his own lawful kingdom of imagination, without any quibbles or questions such as arise afterwards out of false moralities and philosophies, touching the nature of falsehood and truth. In other words, I believe that the child has inside his head a pretty correct and complete definition of the whole nature and function of art; with the one addition that he is quite incapable of saying, even to himself, a single word on the subject. Would that many other professors of aesthetics were under a similar limitation. Anyhow, he does not say to himself, “This is a real street, in which mother could go shopping.” He does not say to himself, ” This is an exact realistic copy of a real street, to be admired for its technical correctness.” Neither does he say, “This is an unreal street, and I am drugging and deceiving my powerful mind with something that is a mere illusion.” Neither does he say, “This is only a story, and nurse says it is very naughty to tell stories.” If he says anything, he only says what was said by those men who saw the white blaze of the Transfiguration, “It is well for us to be here.”
This is the beginning of all sane art criticism: wonder combined with the complete serenity of the conscience in the acceptance of such wonders. The purity of the child largely consists in its entire absence of morality in the sense of Puritan morality, and all the modern and muddled moralities that have sprung from it, scientific and provincial and equivocal, especially the confusions about different meanings of words like “fact” and “fable” and falsehood. The problem is very close to the real problem about images. A child knows that a doll is not a baby; just as clearly as a real believer knows that a statue of an angel is not an angel. But both know that in both cases the image has the power of both opening and concentrating the imagination. Stevenson, whom I shall always count a fountain of fine inspiration, and certainly a man gifted with the eye that sees the daydreams of childhood in broad daylight, was nevertheless not quite sound on this example, possibly because he was not quite sound on the other. He talks too often of the child having his head in a cloud of confusion and indifference to fact or fancy. I believe that our difficulty with the child has the directly opposite cause. It comes because the child is perfectly clear about the difference, not only between truth and falsehood but between fiction and falsehood. He understands the two essential types of truth: the truth of the mystic, which turns a fact into a truth where it should be turned into a truth, because the alternative is a triviality; and the truth of the martyr, which treats a truth as a fact, where it should be treated as a fact, because the alternative is a lie. In other words, the child knows perfectly well without being told the difference between saying he has seen the policeman cut in two in the pantomime, and saying he has seen his little brother break the jug in the nursery, when he really broke it himself. It is we who have grown confused about these categories, and cannot realise the swiftness and clarity with which the child accepts what we call the convention of art. Looking at the street down which the clown pursues the policeman with a poker he would never dream of saying in the ordinary sense, indeed he would never dream of saying at all, “That is a real street.” But still less would he ever dream of saying, “That is an unreal street.” He has a better understanding of dreams—and visions.
In the case of the Pantomime there is one plain fact which clenches this conviction for me. I know I knew that the scenery and costume were “artificial”, because I deeply rejoiced that they were artificial. I liked the notion that things were made of painted wood or plastered by hand with gold and silver. These were the vestments and ornaments of the ritual; but they were not the rite, still less the revelation. I liked the magic-box called a stage, because there, for some reason, the light that never was on sea or land was on paint and paste-board. But I knew perfectly well that it was paint and paste-board. It would be impossible for anybody not to know that who had a toy-theatre of his own. In the Pantomime of my childhood, with its somewhat simpler scenery, there were tricks of mere stage carpentry which I enjoyed as much as if I were working them myself. There was one way of representing tossing waves, by rank behind rank of escaloped blue walls as groundpieces, moved in opposite directions so that the crests seemed to cross and dance. I knew how it was done, because my father did it himself before my very eyes, in my own toy-theatre at home. But it gave me such ecstasy that even now when I think of it for an instant my heart leaps up like the wave. I knew it was not water, but I knew it was sea; and in that flash of knowledge I had passed far beyond those who suffer the fixed and freezing illusion, uttered by the pessimistic poet, that “the sea’s a lot of water that happens to be there.” In imagination there is no illusion; no, not even an instant of illusion. For no split second even then did I believe that people had cut in two a live man—even if he was only a policeman. If I had believed it, I should have felt very different. What I felt was that it was right; that it was a good and enlarging and inspiriting thing to see; that it was an excellent thing to look down on the strange street where such things could be seen; in short, I could say then, with a quite undivided mind, that it was a very good Christmas present to go to the Pantomime.
READING THE RIDDLE
An infinite number of years ago, when I was the chief weakness of a publisher’s office, I remember that there was issued from that establishment a book of highly modern philosophy: a work of elaborate evolutionary explanation of everything and nothing; a work of the New Theology. It was called “The Great Problem Solved” or some such title. When this book had been out for a few days it began to promise an entirely unexpected success. Booksellers sent to ask about it, travellers came in and asked for it, even the ordinary public stood in a sort of knot outside the door, and sent in their bolder spirits to make inquiries.
Even to the publisher this popularity seemed remarkable; to me (who had dipped into the work, when I should have been otherwise employed) it appeared utterly incredible.
After some little time, however, when they had examined “The Great Problem Solved”, the lesser problem was also solved. We found that people were buying it under the impression that it was a detective story. I do not blame them for their desire, and most certainly I do not blame them for their disappointment. It must have exasperated them, it would certainly infuriate me, to open a book expecting to find a cosy, kindly, human story about a murdered man found in a cupboard, and find instead a lot of dull, bad philosophy about the upward progress and the purer morality. I would rather read any detective book than that book. I would rather spend my time in finding out why a dead man was dead than in slowly comprehending why a certain philosopher had never been alive.
But this little incident has always stuck to me as a symbol of what is really wrong with modern popular religion. Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul, than a work of silly police fiction? Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul than a work of old theology? When those unfortunate clients bought “The Great Problem Solved”, perhaps it was inevitable that they should feel slightly cooled and lowered in their vitality; perhaps no philosophical work can really be so good as a good detective story. But at any rate there need not have been such an absolute abyss between them. People need not have felt that they had paid for the most exciting kind of book and got the least exciting kind of book. It cannot be right that religion should be the dullest of subjects. There must be something wrong if the most important human business is also the least exciting. There must be something wrong if everything is not interesting.
A man called Smith goes out for a walk, and stops by a bookstall, where he sees a book called “The Great Problem Solved”. If Smith finds that this book solves a problem in crime, he is entranced. If Smith finds that it solves a problem in chess, he is interested. If Smith finds that it solves the problem in the last issue of Answers, he is genuinely excited. But if Smith finds that it solves the problem of Smith, that it explains the stones under his feet, and the stars over his head, that it tells him suddenly why it really is that he likes chess or detective stories, or anything else; if I say, Smith finds that the book explains Smith—then we are told he finds it dull. It may be a democratic prejudice, but I do not believe this. I think that Smith likes modern chess problems more than modern philosophical problems for the very simple reason that they are better. I think he likes a modern detective story better than a modern religion simply because there are some good modern detective stories and no good modern religions. In short, he buys “The Great Problem Solved” as a police novel, because be knows that in a police novel, in some shape or form, the great problem will be solved. And he does not buy it as a book of modern philosophy, because he knows that in a book of modern philosophy, the great problem will certainly not be solved. This title as the title of a police romance is a sensation, but as the title of a metaphysical work it is a swindle. Those early friends of mine bought the book when they thought that it solved the mystery of Berkeley-square, but dropped it like hot bricks when they found that it professed only to solve the mystery of existence. But if those people had really believed for a moment that it did solve the mystery of existence they would not have dropped it like hot bricks. They would have walked over hot bricks for ten miles to find it.
That forgotten book may stand as a type of all the new theological literature. What is wrong with it is not that it professes to state the paradox of God, but that it professes to state the paradox of God as a truism. You may or may not be able to reveal the divine secret; but at least you cannot let it leak out. If ever it comes, it will be unmistakable, it will kill or cure. Judaism, with its dark sublimity, said that if a man saw God he would die. Christianity conjectures that (by an even more catastrophic fatality) if he sees God he will live for ever. But whatever happens will be something decisive and indubitable. A man after seeing God may die; but at least he will not be slightly unwell, and then have to take a little medicine and then have to call in a doctor. If any of us ever do read the riddle, we shall read it in brutal black and blazing white, exactly as we do read the riddle of some sixpenny mystery of murder. If we ever do find the solution, we shall know that it is the right solution.
This dark and drastic quality there has been certainly in all real religions. The ordinary detective story has one deep quality in common with Christianity; it brings home the crime in a quarter that is unsuspected. In any good detective story the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The judgment at the end of any silly sensational story is like the judgment at the end of the world; it is unexpected. As the sensational story always makes the apparently blameless banker, the seemingly spotless aristocrat, the author of the incomprehensible crime, so the author of Christianity told us that in the end the bolt would fall with a brutal novelty, and he that exalted himself would be abased.
The actual records of great religions are so terribly theatrical that Mr. Bernard Shaw recently said that the story of the Crucifixion in the Gospels was too dramatic to be true. This is sufficiently characteristic of the Fabian political philosophy, which has never lived in the heart of any heroic politics. The story of Danton and Robespierre (to take an accidental example) with its “speeches”, “eternal daring”, “If we do this our names are never forgotten among men”, “The blood of Danton chokes you”, “There is a God”—shows what men do say. These things were said, and said suddenly, because the heart of man was high. When man is at his utmost he is in a state indescribable; he tells the truth or dies.
It is not in your lot or mine to live in a great or an ecstatic age. Men talk of the noise and unrest of our age; but I think that all that age is really very sleepy; all the wheels and the traffic send one to sleep. The shrieking pistons and the shattering hammers are one enormous and most soothing lullaby. But even in our quiet life I think we can feel the great fact that is the core of all religion. However quiet may be the skies, or however cool the meadows, we always feel that if we did know what they meant the meaning would be something mighty and shattering. About the weakest weed there is still a sensational difference between understanding and not understanding. We stare at a tree in an infinite leisure; but we know all the time that the real difference is between a stillness of mystery and an explosion of explanation. We know all the time that the question is whether it will always continue to be a tree or turn suddenly into something else.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A Tale of Two Cities was written in the later part of Dicken’s literary development, and in one respect stands absolutely alone among all his works. It is, I think, the one solitary instance, from which a critic in distant days could possibly deduce that this very great literary man had ever read any literature at all. This generalisation may be subject to certain partial modifications, to be considered when we consider the course of his life; but as a matter of proportion, which is the essential of truth, it is true. In a thousand ways, ranging from the most depressing destitution to the most pantomimic parade and luxury, Dickens showed that he had studied life, and could turn life into literature. In a thousand moods, ranging from the rankest vulgar farce to the most stagey and melodramatic morality, he showed that he had within himself the powers and passions and appetites to stock the whole world with stories. But very seldom indeed, in enjoying the world of Dickens, do we feel that there was really any writer but Dickens in the world. Like all very creative men, he unfixes the dates of history, and stands as a sort of immortal anachronism. It is sometimes with a sort of start that we remember that his Hogarthian farce and tragedy went on long after Keats had written “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and well into the time when Tennyson was writing the poems of his best period, which was his Pre-Raphaelite period. Dickens, in practice and in private life, was a very great admirer of Tennyson. Forster, his biographer, says that his literary tastes touching his contemporaries varied very much, but that he never failed in his admiration of Tennyson. But I do not honestly believe that anybody could guess, from any printed word— from the first words about Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate, to the last broken and doubtful sentences that hint at the identity of Datchery or the destruction of Drood—that Dickens had taken any particular pleasure in “The Lady of Shalott”, or “Sir Galahad”. It is partly a tribute to the strength of Dickens that his mind was so teeming with images that he never needed to borrow mere ideas. It is partly, also a real weakness in his position, that he had never valued the great culture of the past, and therefore could not fully understand its developments all around him in the culture of the present. But, for good or evil, it is true that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred nobody (to use a popular phrase) ever made a bulge in Dickens; nobody even made a dent in him. He remained, with all his gifts and glories, solidly and almost insolently himself. The one example, among all works of his authorship, in which we feel even faintly the presence, or perhaps the shadow, of another author, is A Tale of Two Cities; and that other author is Thomas Carlyle.
As I have said, the normal human conditions necessary to his normal human life, involved some modification of this statement. He was very largely what is called a self-taught man, which means that be was taught, not by himself, but by other people; by other people acting as they really act in the real world, and not as they pose before pupils they are paid to teach. His domestic circumstances from the first were very insecure, so that he saw more of books than of school-books; he learned more from tattered volumes left about in a tavern than from grammars provided primly in an educational establishment. But it is quite true that among the tattered volumes in the tavern, or elsewhere, there were some with titles not yet entirely forgotten: titles like Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones and Roderick Random and Tristram Shandy. In this sense it is true that he, like every other human being who ever wrote or even read, owed something to what had already been written. And indeed the great comic classics, which were the glory of eighteenth-century England, did leave a certain trend or track in his mind, which is an utterly trackless waste as regards all the things that anybody could ever have tried to teach him in school. It is evident, however, from the very nature of the story itself, that school in his case must have been almost as intermittent as truancy. Charles Dickens was born in Portsea, adjoining Portsmouth, in 1812, and was promptly carried away from it at the age of two. He then became a Londoner for a few years, equally infantile; and then his wandering family settled down in Chatham, which was about the nearest approach it ever made to settling down anywhere. Thus we find first the two facts, that are both determining and important: one, that his family was one of very varied economic fortunes, such as leads to frequent change of abode, and has indeed made the modern poorer middle class almost as nomadic as Arabs; and the other, that such background as a child of genius will always feel and value (if he has half a chance to do it) was for Charles Dickens, to the day of his death, the great roads of Kent that go down to Dover; and the gardens and hopfields and the towers of Rochester Cathedral. In so far as he had any traditions, that was his traditional environment; just as in so far as he had any culture, it was that of the great comic novelists of England a hundred years before. He was so far traditional by instinct that he never forgot either of the influences; he named one of his sons after Henry Fielding; and, when he came to comfort and affluence, he made his home on Gad’s Hill, on that great Kentish road where Falstaff had played the glorious fool long ago.
The private life of Dickens, however, is of little importance to the outline of criticism here involved, and is indeed in its own nature somewhat irrelevant and accidental. Its chief tragedy was almost an accident, and its premature close was a sort of defeat brought about by an excess of triumphs. It is well known that in his early youth, while he was still a parliamentary reporter living in London after his boyhood in Chatham, he married the daughter of one of his literary patrons named Hogarth, and that by a long process of disagreement, about which critics can always disagree, he came to be alienated from his wife; though, curiously enough, remaining on terms of perfectly sober and fraternal friendship with one of her sisters. There is no need to pronounce upon a problem which was really kept private, by the not undignified prejudice of the Victorian time; it is enough to say that no very grave charge was ever brought against either party by any of the small group of people who knew the truth. It is more relevant here to remark that at almost the same moment as his marriage occurred his first and perhaps most triumphant entry into literature. His first book, commonly called Pickwick or the Pickwick Papers, is supreme among his works in many ways, but especially in the way here in question: that it is a purely personal creation and owes nothing to any other book. It is all the more amusing to remember that a spiteful attempt was made by some of his enemies to suggest that it owed everything to its original illustrator, an artist named Seymour, who drew spirited sporting sketches of the sort then fashionable. It is a peculiarly false insinuation, in a literary sense. For it is the whole point of Pickwick that its rush of inspiration not only leaves Seymour’s first ideas behind, but leaves Dickens’ first ideas quite as far behind. We might say that the whole point of Pickwick is that it does not stick to the point; or at least that the point is not Pickwick, in the sense of the President of the Pickwick Club. The best things in Pickwick have nothing to do with the principal characters, still less with the preliminary chapters, and least of all with the early illustrations. It is an exceptional case in which the story grows better the more it strays from the story. Dickens did not preserve this limpid and perfect liberty in his later stories. He produced better novels, but never so good a book. Still, we can say of the ensuing series of books that, whatever else they were, they were not bookish. They showed Dickens interested in different things, but never any other authors influencing Dickens. Thus, in his next book Oliver Twist, which he seemed resolved to make as grim and lurid as Pickwick had been gay and luminous, he was in fact protesting against many social evils, which had already produced noble protests from great men of that age. The workhouse he hated had been hated as healthily by Cobbett or by Hood, by Cartwright or by Carlyle. But nobody could say that one word of Oliver Twist sounds as if it were suggested by the style of Cobbett or by the style of Carlyle. Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit show him even more obviously walking down his own street, in some ways even a narrow and Cockney street; the same applies to The Old Curiosity Shop; and, though Barnaby Rudge is a sort of experiment in the way of a historical novel, it is not much more really historical than the Old Curiosity Shop or its Wardour Street curiosities. Dombey and Son has the same now established balance of perfect comedy and rather imperfect melodrama; and though David Copperfield strikes far deeper, and releases a much finer spring of inspiration, it is even more personal than the rest. Dickens has found a new source of inspiration, but not by reading anybody else’s book; rather by reading his own diary. The same statement applies to that fine book, Great Expectations, and a much sharper social criticism, still extorted by contemporary facts rather than contemporary culture, appears in the unconscious or unclassifiable Socialism of Hard Times. It mixes his own observations less with mere fancies than did his first protest in Oliver Twist; but it is always his own observations and nobody else’s. There is little to vary this verdict in the other two novels of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. It is only when we come to the book which is here specially in question, A Tale of Two Cities, which appeared in 1859, that we have anything like the particular impression of which I speak; that Dickens has felt the pressure of an imaginative atmosphere outside his own bursting sufficiency and energy, that energy from whose centrifugal fury all fancies but his own had been spurned away.
This compact and competent, and some would say conceited, sense of self-expression does in A Tale of Two Cities, for the first time, seem to admit something external, something that might be called an echo. Indeed, in one way, it might be called the echo of an echo. It is Carlyle’s French Revolution rather than Michelet’s French Revolution; in other words, it is not entirely or exactly the French Revolution of the French Revolutionists. Dickens does tend to neglect, as Carlyle did tend to neglect, the extent to which the revolutionists themselves regarded it not as an explosion of unreason, or even an explosion of passion, but as an inevitable explosion of reason. They themselves might almost have said that the explosion was an explanation; as is the explosion that occurs during a chemical lecture. Carlyle, who had laboriously studied all the documents and historical literature of the French Revolution, never quite understood this. It is small blame by comparison to Dickens, who had never studied any documents or any history or any literature, or hardly any books except his own, if he did not understand it either. But he had studied one book, and that was Carlyle’s book; and the shadow of that luminous but lurid cloud lies over the whole landscape and scenery of his story. It is very difficult to define or prove these merely atmospheric things. A short if clumsy way of putting it is to compare the general tone of Dickens towards the mere notion of a mob, as it is in Barnaby Rudge, with his tone towards such a mob in A Tale of Two Cities. The comparison, of course, is not quite fair. Even a man so little in touch with history as he, could tell that the second was more historic than the first; that the second was at least an outbreak of liberty, by comparison with an outbreak of bigotry. But there is more in the contrast than that; we feel that he could never have taken a Gordon Rioter seriously, even if he had liked him, as he did so often seem to like his most ludicrous and indefensible characters; as the reader does really, in a way, like Sim Tappertit. He did not like Madame Defarge, but he did take her seriously. If she had occurred in Barnaby Rudge, she would have been a vulgar villainess; as she occurred in A Tale of Two Cities, she is a Fate. In other words, there is not only a romantic but a mystical element that has entered the story; and though Dickens was in one sense always a romantic, he was certainly never a mystic. In some sense the comparison involves a paradox. Carlyle, as a reactionary, declared that the mob, being made of most men, was made mostly of fools. But Carlyle also allowed for a mystical suggestion that the folly of men was the wisdom of God. Dickens, as a radical, regarded the mob, in so far as it meant most ordinary men, as being composed of reasonable and responsible citizens, whose votes were all valuable and whose intellects were all capable of benefiting by education and discussion. But, in practice, when Dickens did see a mass of men in any sort of elemental disorder, acting in anger or by some accident lawless or unlettered, he was deeply disgusted in every corner of his compact and sensible intelligence, and hated that very wildness which Carlyle half admired. Dickens felt like this, for instance, towards the sprawling licence and spasmodic ferocity of the more wild and western elements of the American Republic. He would, if subjected to the real experience, have been quite as much horrified by the ferocious pugnacity and spontaneous militarism of the mob of the French Republic. Nevertheless, the Carlylean sense of a sort of savage symbolism in the great struggles of history does make the atmosphere of this book, or perhaps of half this book, different from the whole bulk of his other books.
Perhaps it is really impossible for any good citizen to write A Tale of Two Cities. He will always see one from the outside and the other from the inside; and the line of relative reality and unreality in this case runs fairly clear. Thus the description of the old-fashioned London bank is unmistakably written by the old London Dickens. The story of the sacrifice of Sydney Carton, though genuinely touching and nobler especially as compared with some of the Dickensian melodramas, is still in a sense a London melodrama, with the larger background of a Paris tragedy. The hero is being heroic for private reasons; whereas nobody understands or does justice to the French Revolution, who forgets that half its leaders lost their heads by really being heroic for public reasons. It is easy enough to make fun of their classical rhetoric about Brutus who killed his sons, or Timoleon who killed his brother; but it is not so easy to deny that, if they had too much of this notion of sacrificing private good to public good, we have far too much of the corruption and cowardice that comes of sacrificing public good to private good. The ideals for which that war was waged were insufficient but largely just; and it is curious and rather moving to note that the author is so far exalted by the atmosphere that he turns in the end to an older and in truth a larger ideal, which exists before and after and affirms the same justice in public and in private life. I know nothing in all the works of this man of genius which is, in the true sense, so imaginative as that last strange voice, coming from nowhere, those great timeless words put into the mouth of no mortal character, spoken suddenly as by a trumpet out of the empty sky, between the click of the knitting-needles and the crash of the guillotine: “I am the Resurrection and the Life …”
GOD AND GOODS
It is often noted, and generally truly enough, that Bolshevism is necessarily connected with atheism. It is not so much realised, perhaps, that atheism is now under an increasing necessity of connecting itself with Bolshevism. For Bolshevism is at least partly positive, even if it is largely destructive. And the history of the purely negative notion, of an abstract attack on religion, has been in this respect a rather curious history. Taken as a whole, indeed it is at once melancholy and comic. Those who in modern times have tried to destroy popular religion, or a traditional faith, have always felt the necessity of offering something solid as a substitute. The queer part of it is that they have offered about a dozen totally different things; some of them entirely contradictory things; that the promises perpetually varied, and only the negative threat remained the same.
Just before the French Revolution, among the first eighteenth-century philosophers, it was generally assumed that Liberty was not merely a good thing, but the one and only origin of all good things. The man living according to Nature, the Natural Man or the Noble Savage, would find himself immediately free and happy so long as he never went to church, and was careful to cut the parish priest in the street. These philosophers soon discovered, what the parish priest could have told them at the start, that it is rather more difficult to be a happy animal, than to be a happy man. Indeed, a man cannot be an animal for the same reason that he cannot be an angel; because be is a man. But for some time the philosophers who did not believe in God, whom they regarded as a myth, managed to believe in Nature without realising that she is a metaphor. And they assured those whom they waved on to the burning down of churches, that after that they would be eternally happy in their fields and gardens.
Then after the political revolution came the industrial revolution; and with it an enormous new importance attached to science. The amiable atheists went back to the people, smiled at them, coughed slightly, and explained that it was still necessary to burn down churches, but that a slight error had been made about the substitute for churches. The second atheist philosophy was founded, not on the fact that Nature is kind, but on the fact that Nature is cruel; not that fields are free and beautiful, but that scientific men and industrialists are so energetic, that they will soon cover all the fields with factories and warehouses. Now there was a new substitute for God; which was gas and coal and iron and the privilege of turning wheels in order to work these substances. It was now positively stated that economic liberty, the freedom to buy and sell and hire and exploit, would make people so blissfully happy that they would forget all their dreams of the fields of heaven; or for that matter of the fields of earth. And somehow that also has been a little disappointing.
Two Earthly Paradises had collapsed. The first was the natural paradise of Rousseau; the second the economic paradise of Ricardo. Men did not become perfect through being free to live and love; men did not become perfect through being free to buy and sell. It was obviously time for the atheists to find a third inevitable and immediate ideal. They have found it in Communism. And it does not trouble them that it is quite different from their first ideal and quite contrary to their second. All they want is some supposed betterment of humanity which will be a bribe for depriving humanity of divinity. Read between the lines of half a hundred new books—outlines of popular science and educational publications on history and philosophy— and you will see that the only fundamental feeling in them is the hatred of religion. The only positive thing is negative. But they are forced more and more to idealise Bolshevism, simply because it is the only thing left that is still new enough to be offered as a hope, when every one of the revolutionary hopes they have themselves offered has in its turn become hopeless.
FROM MEREDITH TO RUPERT BROOKE
The title of the Age of Reason has been given to the eighteenth century, though the typical eighteenth-century man who invented it probably meant it as a prophetic and optimistic description of the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. Certainly if Thomas Paine had foreseen the actual nineteenth century, he would have called it the Age of Romanticism. If he had foreseen the actual twentieth century, he would have called it the Age of Nonsense, the Age of Unreason, especially in the departments originally identified with rationalism, such as the department of science. To him Einstein would have been merely a contradiction in terms and Epstein a disease afflicting bronze and marble. It is therefore not altogether misleading to measure modern developments, for good or evil, as from a sort of datum line of simple or self-evident rationality to be found in the eighteenth century. Whatever else is false, it is false to say that the world has increased in clarity and intelligibility and logical completeness. Whatever else is true, it is true to say that the world has grown more bewildering, especially in the scientific spheres supposed to be ruled by law or explained by reason. The simplification of the older rationalists may have been, and indeed was, an over-simplification. But it did simplify and it did satisfy; above all, it satisfied them. It would not be altogether unfair to say that it filled them not only with satisfaction but with self-satisfaction. And, as historical divisions are never clean-cut, this rationalistic self-satisfaction descended in part to their children; in many ways it may be found pervading the nineteenth century, and, in the case of some rather old-fashioned persons, even our own century.
Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was very different; and the Victorian Age was vividly different. And it was different from the eighteenth century chiefly in this: that the old clarity of rationalism and humanitarianism was more and more coloured and clouded by certain waves of specially modern imagination or hypothesis or taste and fancy. These new notions had been unknown in the Age of Reason and even in the Age of Revolution. These sentiments had never disturbed the generalisations of Jefferson and the Jacobins any more than they had disturbed the doctrines of Johnson and the Jacobites. These sentiments colour everything in the Victorian Age, and they must be understood before attempting any survey of it.
It is generally difficult to illustrate this truth without being involved in a discussion about religion. But there is, as it happens, another outstanding example, which does not directly involve any interest in religion. I mean the enormous interest in race. That would alone be enough to stamp the nineteenth century as something sharply different from the eighteenth century. That would alone be enough to mark off the Victorian from the older Georgian frame of mind. In the eighteenth century, both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries inherited the ancient religious and philosophic habit of legislating for mankind. A man like Johnson thought of men everywhere as under certain religious conditions, though he thought them happier under conditions of subordination. A man like Jefferson thought of men everywhere as under certain moral conditions, though he thought them happiest in a condition of equality. A man like Gibbon might doubt both the moral systems of Johnson and Jefferson. But it never occurred to Gibbon to explain the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by exalting the Teuton as such against the Latin as such, or vice versa. Gibbon had religious prejudices, or, if you will, irreligious prejudices. But the notion of having racial prejudices in a quarrel between some brutal Vandal or Visigoth and some petty Byzantine official would have seemed to him as nonsensical as taking sides among Chinese tongs or Zulu tribes. Similarly, the eighteenth-century Tories were traditional but not tribal. Even a man as late as Metternich, while he might be on the watch against French atheism or even Russian orthodoxy disturbing the Austrian Empire, would have troubled his head very little over the fact that the Austrian Empire contained a mixture of Teutons and Slavs. The rise of this romance of race, or, as some would say, of this science of race, was one of the distinct and decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially of the Victorian Age.
It will be well to mark in what way these colossal clouds of historical imagination or theory actually coloured or discoloured the dead daylight, which an earlier rationalism thought to have dawned upon the world. In the case of Victorian literature, perhaps it is best tested by noting how it affected even the Victorians who might have been expected to escape its effect. Carlyle was not merely affected by it we might almost say that he was made by it. Anyhow, he was inspired and intoxicated by it; he was at once overwhelmed and made overwhelming. All his history and philosophy was full of this one idea: that all that is good in our civilisation comes, not from the older civilisation, but from a yet older thing that might be called a benevolent barbarism. All light as well as fire, all law as well as liberty, was supposed to be derived from a sort of ethnic energy originally called Germanic, afterwards more prudently called Teutonic; and now, with almost an excess of caution, called Nordic. The merits of this racial theory, as against the old Roman theory, of European culture, are difficult to discuss without trenching on controversial themes. Personally I should say that when certain European provinces broke with the Roman tradition, they set up certain Puritan theologies of their own, which could not last, or at any rate have not lasted. Anyhow, it is curious that in each of these provinces the place of both the new and the old religion has really been taken by a stark and rather narrow national pride. The Prussian is more proud of being a Prussian than of being a Protestant, in the sense of a Lutheran. The Orangeman is more proud of being what he calls an Ulsterman than of being a Calvinist, in the sense of studying the strict Calvinist theology. And even in England, where the atmosphere was more mild and the elements more mixed, the same type of intense insular self-consciousness has in some degree developed; and it has been not untruly said that patriotism is the religion of the English. In any case, to take the same test, an Englishman is normally more proud of being an Englishman than of being an Anglican. It was therefore not unnatural that when these lands, that were the extinct volcanoes of the great Puritan fire, sought for a more modern and general bond of association, they should seek it in that sort of pride in the race, which is the extension of the pride in the tribe. It is right to say that there is much in the idea of race that stirs the imagination and lends itself to the production of literature. The ideal of race, like the ideal of religion, has its own symbols, prophecies, oracles and holy places. If it is less mystical, it is equally mysterious. The riddle of heredity, the bond of blood, the doom which in a hundred human legends attends certain houses or families, are things quite sufficiently native to our nature to lend a sincerity to the sense of national or even international kinship. Many may quite honestly have felt that race was as religious as religion. But one thing it certainly was not. It was not as rational as religion. It was not as universal or philosophical as religion. At its best it involved a sort of noble prejudice; and its romanticism clouded the old general judgments upon men as men, whether dogmatic or democratic. Carlyle was the most romantic of all these romantic Victorian writers, and largely owed to this his predominance in the romantic Victorian age. But his popular champions, like Froude and Kingsley, were even more romantic; though in the case of Kingsley the romancing was really honest romancing, while in the case of Froude (I cannot but think) the word romancing is something of a euphemism.
Only, as I have said, the way in which this racial romance penetrated the Victorian culture can best be seen, not in an obvious case like Carlyle, but in much more remote cases like Matthew Arnold or Meredith. To take the latter case first: George Meredith was in one sense an entirely international intellectual; a Liberal humanist; a true child of the French Revolution, which he celebrated in sumptuous odes. But he illustrates the indirect effect of the racial craze, which is that the other side often accepted the distinction. Not only did the Teutonist talk about being a Teuton, but the Celt talked about being a Celt. A great mass of Meredith’s social judgment is modified, and, to my taste, a little falsified, by his insistence on setting the Saxon against the Celt, when he has to set the Englishman against the Irishman or the Welshman. He often satirised in the Englishman exactly what the Teutonist praised in the Englishman; and it was often something that the Englishman does not happen to possess. So in the other case: Matthew Arnold made himself specially and supremely the apostle of a cosmopolitan culture; he did a vast amount of real good by insisting on the truism that England is a part of Europe. He was at his best in a contempt for the contempt that was felt for Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. But he could not bring himself to treat them simply as Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. He was affected by the universal fashion of ethnology and worried by the racial generalisations. When he talked what was relatively excellent sense about the senseless treatment of Ireland, he thought of such things too much as Celtic Studies and too little as Irish Studies. He also tried to explain the English faults as part of “the German paste in us”, and wasted on anthropology what was meant for the study of mankind. We might take a third example. William Morris was on one side a Communist and almost bound to be an internationalist; he was on the other side a medievalist, appealing to that ancient beauty that belonged to all Europeans alike. But he was encumbered with a clumsy desire to be Saxon, to treat English as if it were merely the rudimentary language of the Angles; and moved his admirer, Stevenson, to an intense irritation by writing “whereas” when he only meant “where”.
I have mentioned this particular Victorian fashion, the racial theory of history, as a primary and prominent thing, because it is not generally mentioned at all. We are so accustomed, in reading modern records of recent or ancient things, to gain an impression of an ever-expanding world, called in the only too typical Victorian expression, “the thoughts of men being widened by the process of the suns”, that we often forget the many periods when the world contracted into a new narrowness or exclusiveness, or the thoughts of men visibly shrank and shrivelled under some fresh influence of isolation or distinction. This was certainly true of the tribalism and imperialism that the nineteenth century developed, out of a romance of races, as compared with the first revolutionary generalisations about the human race. The fact is plain, for instance, in the story of the first revolutionary experiment— the American Republic. In the time of Jefferson, many of those who held slaves disapproved of slavery; many of those who approved of slavery did not specially approve of it as negro slavery. The notion of the negro as something peculiarly perilous or pestilent is not an ancient prejudice but a very recent and largely anthropological fashion. It is akin to all that dates from Darwin; and the popularisation by Huxley of an almost pessimistic type of evolution. Modern Southerners are much more hostile to negroes than they were when they owned slaves. As there rose recently in America the anthropological theory that the negro is only an ape, so there rose recently in Europe the anthropological notion that the Pole is only a Slav, or that the Irishman is only a Celt. People were so proud of discovering these larger groups that they failed to notice that they are really looser groups. They belonged to what the eminent Victorian truly called the fairy-tales of science. They had neither the precision that belongs to doctrinal definition nor the practicality that belongs to daily experience. In religion and morals we all really know what we mean by a man, and in the stress of real life we all really know what we mean by an Irishman. It is by no means certain that we all know what we mean by a Celt. Hence something large and imaginative, but formless and partly imaginary, began to spread over popular sentiment with the spread of popular science. It was darker and more dubious than either the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century or the nationalism of the nineteenth. It was not so clean-cut; indeed I will venture to say that it was not so clean. It was mixed with the mud and mist, the chaotic clay and cloud, of primitive and even bestial beginnings; it had only vague visions of barbaric migrations and massacres and enslavements. It started all our recent preference for the prehistoric to the historic. All this must be remembered as an influence overshadowing the second half of the nineteenth century, because it eventually took a more pointed and controversial form which involved not only materialism but pessimism. The earlier rationalists may or may not have been materialists; but they certainly were not pessimists. They were, I admit, rather exaggerated and excessive optimists. It is none the less curious that the general revolutionary tradition, of revolt and criticism of conditions, which began with the philosophy of Rousseau, should have ended with the philosophy of Thomas Hardy.
So much for one side of this later Victorian change. But the mere mention of Hardy and the realistic rebels will remind us that it had another side, which was a very good side. Probably speaking, it consisted in turning the attention from purely political wrongs to fundamental economic wrongs. In this also Carlyle, who belongs to the earlier period, continues to colour and even control the destinies of the later. In the matter of dates Carlyle and Macaulay covered the same period. In the matter of destinies they lived in two different centuries. Macaulay was, for good and evil, entirely a man of the eighteenth century. He was a Whig as Fox had been a Whig; a patriot as Pitt had been a patriot; a Protestant as any Erastian latitudinarian Georgian parson had been a Protestant; a logician as Dr. Johnson was a logician; a historian as Gibbon was a historian. Carlyle, who had brought into history the doubtful romance of blood, also brought into politics the very real tragedy of bread. He stands at the beginning of all the best efforts of the later Victorians to face the problems of labour and hunger that had developed in the depths of the new industrial civilisation. With the great exception of Cobbett, who had stood apart and alone, misunderstood and abused by all parties, it is fair to say that Carlyle started much of the merely social unrest of conscience which has modified the evils of the later nineteenth century. It is needless here to weigh the evil against the good; or to discuss how much of a certain disinterested dignity, in the old Republicans, was lost in his practical and impatient clamour for captains and for kings. It is only necessary to insist on the reality of the contrast and the change. Grattan, a great and typical orator of the eighteenth-century ideal, had said that the Irishman might go in rags, but he must not go in chains. Ruskin and the social reformers reversed the principle, until some of the extreme Socialists, like the Marxian Communists, are now inclined to say that a man must go in chains so that he may not go in rags.
Ruskin was the heir and representative of Carlyle in this later and better Victorian development. It is unnecessary to react against romanticism to such an extent as a recent critic, who summed up Ruskin in a book on the Victorians by saying that at least his economics were all scientifically sound though he could not write for toffee. He certainly could not write in that stately modern style in which toffee figures as the prize of writing. When the critic suggests that he could not write, it merely means that the critic does not like that particular sort of writing, which proves rather the limitations of the critic than the incapacities of the writer. Ruskin certainly wrote poetical prose, which may not for the moment be fashionable in an age of prosaic poetry. But to say that it is not good poetical prose is simply to be ignorant of the varied possibilities of good writing. It is also true that what he did he overdid, which is largely true of the whole of this highly coloured and romantic final development of Victorianism. Even those few who deliberately tried to correct it by understatement managed somehow to overstate their understatement. Matthew Arnold deliberately endeavoured to introduce a French classical balance and critical detachment into English letters. The consequence was that he was called a prig, which was unjust but not unthinkable; whereas no Frenchman reading Saint-Beuve ever thought of thinking that he was a prig. Walter Pater wished to create an art criticism more detached than that of Ruskin; but he did in fact manage to create the impression of being artificial as well as artistic. It was very difficult to be classic in the later Victorian atmosphere. There was a romantic unrest about it, so that even the umpires were competitive and combative. The loss of a natural repose, in Latin logic or French clarity, was one of the penalties of parting with the spirit of the eighteenth century. Another mark of it was the growth of an intellectual individualism which expressed itself, not only in being outré, but actually in being obscure. Browning and Meredith were among the very greatest of Victorians; and over both of them brooded that cloud I have described as coming up to over-shadow the epoch; and though it was coloured gorgeously like a cloud of sunset, it none the less came between many people and the sun.
George Meredith largely stood alone; but he stood as it were representing many others who had also a taste for standing alone. All this last phase is full of men whom it is interesting to remember and yet very easy to forget. It was because of the individualistic isolation of their talents and even their topics. An example is Richard Jefferies, who was “The Gamekeeper At Home”; or T. E. Brown, who made a niche for himself that is somehow at once obscure and popular: or William de Morgan, who with English eccentricity took up literature as a hobby for old age. The danger of all grouping is that we may miss too many of these men who did not fit into groups. Nevertheless, there are two or three groups which may be said to bulk biggest in the period—the period after the triumph of Tennyson and Browning in poetry, or Dickens and Thackeray in fiction. First there appears, primarily through the influence of Ruskin, what was called the Pre-Raphaelite Group; which began with a Ruskinian version of Christian medievalism and shaded off into later forms of aestheticism, not to say Paganism. The leader, who was also the link, was Rossetti, who accepted with delight the medieval pattern, but blazoned it with bolder and warmer colours than some of the literal Pre-Raphaelites would have approved. With him went his sister Christina, who was medieval in the more orthodox sense; and, in a manner very much his own, William Morris, who made the medieval form the expression of modern discontents and social ideals, instead of Christina Rossetti’s religious ideals. The queer transition of the Pre-Raphaelites from a revival of Christianity to a revival of Paganism is complete in the poet Swinburne, who belonged to the set, yet had little in common with the sect. That it had Ruskin at one end and Swinburne at the other illustrates how loose a thing a group is, especially in English literature. Swinburne had three phases; one in which he wrote the best poetry in the worst spirits, or mood or frame of mind for his beautiful boyish singing is not merely in praise of Paganism, but definitely of Pessimism. There is a second period when his spirits are a little better and his poetry a little worse; the period of his political enthusiasm for United Italy and Victor Hugo and the resounding qualities of the word Republic. There is, unfortunately, a third period, in which he imitated himself and did it badly. But the point to seize is that, in his great hour, Swinburne was a spell; he held people like a magic flute, till they forgot that there was any other melody in the world. It is thoroughly typical of such glamours that there has been a violent and very unreasonable reaction against his unreasonable power. With him and Walter Pater the movement ends in its last pagan phase; save perhaps for the queer aestheticism that later became a decadent dandyism in Oscar Wilde.
But already new groups were making this one look old. One was what may be called the Picaresque or Adventurous Group, but may be more recognisable as the group of Stevenson and Henley. Both for good and evil, they reacted into a robust blood-and-thunder literature, which, in the case of Stevenson, who was not only the greater but much the more amiable and balanced of the two, was as blameless as it was bloody. There was, however, a dangerous double use of the very word “blood”. And, quaintly enough, the more dubious element is to be found rather in blood than in bloodshed. The blood that spatters the pages of Treasure Island can only promote a respect for the real virtues of courage or loyalty. The blood that is not shed at all, but remains in the human body, was used to encourage a respect for the real vices and weaknesses of pride and racial contempt. For one important point about this group is this: that through them, or some of them, there came into full power and possession that curious religion of Race, which I have described as developing from Teutonic sources a little time before. It is not to be confused with patriotism or the unselfish love of one’s country. It is a mere pride in being oneself of a certain real or imaginary race or stock. The Frenchman loves France as if she were a woman; the Nordic Man merely loves himself for being a Nordic Man. This weakness did to some extent spoil the spirited attempt of Henley and his school of masculine critics; I mean their very just attempt to show that letters should be red-blooded, as against the green-blooded pessimism of the decadents. But whatever their weaknesses, they did fill the age with a new change and stir, and gave to the pessimists something which if not a cure, was at least an antidote and a counter-irritant. The earliest and best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling came to them like a new breath of prophecy and promise; Sir Henry Newbolt supported the chorus with two or three of the very finest modern English lyrics. There was a general fashion of patriotic poetry, as well as of Jingo journalism—in verse or otherwise. It was the only point on which that strongest and most virile of the pessimists, the Shropshire Lad, could be moved for a moment to a slightly blasphemous cheerfulness. John Davidson, a dark Scot in a dark and even dim state of revolt against everything, also was ready to follow the flag and revolt against everything except the Empire. The point of all this is not that patriotism revived, for the older poets and critics took patriotism for granted: but that the special type of tribal imperialism sprang out of that rather barbaric root of Race, already noted as a romance of science, which reacted against the rationalism of the Revolution.
Fortunately, from the same Stevenson and Henley stock of ideas, came another idea that also filled the age. It came from Stevenson alone, as distinct from Newbolt, Henley, Kipling and the rest, and may be called the cult of the child, but especially of the boy. It would be putting it too harshly, perhaps, to say that Stevenson wanted to go on playing at robbers; whereas Henley and the Imperialists wanted to be robbers. Anyhow, Stevenson saw the fun of what he was doing when be made the child say that he was the captain of a tidy little ship; whereas it is, I believe, the inscrutable fact that Henley did not see any fun in what he was doing when he adjured John Bull to “Storm along, John”, and assured that public character that the whole world would soon be his own. Through Stevenson’s truly magic lantern, which he described in The Lantern-Bearers, there shone a true reillumination of the mystical melodrama of childhood. And in that light many followed to the same sort of fairyland; notably Sir James Barrie, who introduced a sort of irony into fairyland. He continued what may be called the Stevensonian stereoscopic view; the looking at the same object in a double fashion, with the eye of the adult and of the child. But it was mostly through a string of accidental friendships that this fantastic element was connected with the more realistic of the robust school, though of course there were many brilliant individuals who could only be placed with or near that group. Thus Joseph Conrad, though a Pole, was connected with it by his record of hard or violent adventure at sea; and Mr. John Masefield, though he wrote later and longer poems of rural sport or religion, began with rousing sea songs of the buccaneers.
Already, however, a new voice had been heard, and a new influence balanced or rebuked an influence like that of Kipling; and it was a voice from a more remote elfland than the elfland of Peter Pan. Stevenson himself said that he had twice in poetry heard a new note or a unique and arresting voice: once when he read Love In A Valley by George Meredith; and once again when he read some verses called The Lake Island of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats. Yet it is worth remarking that there still remained this curious persistence of the romance of race, even in what was so naturally hostile to the popular romance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The appearance of a new cultural nucleus in Dublin, while it derived something from the Pre-Raphaelites, and therefore something from the Victorians, was so far Victorian in this special respect, that it managed to get entangled like all the rest with an ethnological term: the term “Celtic”. It did not even substitute the old Irish term “Gaelic”. It is true that Mr. Yeats himself, the founder of the school and one of the first poets of recent times, did not really base his own case on anthropology, but rather on history and (very rightly) even more on legend. But it marks the racial influence already described that the word “Celtic” stuck to the movement, which was really a revival of remote legend and a gentle heathenism of the hills. It also explains why there was some reaction against it even in its own home. There are many who came not to care very much about the Celtic Twilight, who have lived to see the Irish Dawn.
About this time, or a little later, in England, there appeared a group formally called Minor Poets; though one of them was certainly a Major Poet. He was classed at the time with John Davidson and Sir William Watson, both of them very genuine poets in their own style; and there is some charming lyricism in their contemporaries, Norman Gale and Richard le Gallienne. Two other writers of fine verse really belong to this period: Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. But I think it fair to say that Francis Thompson, thus classed as one of them, was of another and altogether higher class. He owed something to Coventry Patmore, one of the most really original Victorians, and something to Alice Meynell, a woman who was a poet (not a poetess) of the sort that women were least supposed to be; an intrinsically intellectual poet. But even of these friends he was free; with all the freedom of a creative and supremely productive or fertile genius. His imagery was so imaginative as to be almost crowded; and, in a different sense from the more analytical Victorians, dark with excess of light. Because he was Catholic many would expect him to be Gothic; but there was something in his exuberance that resembled rather the very best of the Baroque.
The necessity of marking the period by moods has led us here to mark it too exclusively by poets, who are the only permanent record of moods. It need not be said that work of another and what some think a more solid sort had been going forward in those last years; some of it very solid indeed, certainly in the best and perhaps also in the more questionable sense. Fiction, for instance, had followed other guides besides romance. The immense influence of Thomas Hardy was there; with his strong sense of the truth of the earth, as also of the tragedy of the dust. It had set many able men working in a mine of realism. The two ablest and most typical in this tradition were Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. If I do not speak here at length of men of genius like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, it is because they are in a sense the opening of another world, and are most vividly lit up by the glare of the Great War and the existing social perils; and these things really mark the close of the period. For an appalling apocalypse came upon all life, and therefore upon all literature; and the most fitting emblems of such splendour and terror, and the arts of peace torn across, and youth going to its death singing, remain with the last few poems of Rupert Brooke.
THE DANGERS OF NECROMANCY
We often lament that the world is divided into sects, all with different narrow ideas. The real trouble is that they all have different broad ideas. It is when it comes to being broadminded that they are most narrow, or at any rate most different. It is their generalisations that cut across each other. The Buddhist believes he is broadminded when he says that all efforts at personal achievement and finality, east or west, Christian or Buddhist, are equally vain and hopeless. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper India. A modern agnostic thinks he is broadminded when he says that all religions or revelations, Catholic or Protestant, savage or civilised, are alike mere myths and guesses at what man can never know. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper Tooting. My idea of broadmindedness is to sympathise with so many of these separate spiritual atmospheres as possible; to respect or love the Buddhists of Tibet or the agnostics of Tooting for their many real virtues and capacities, but to have a philosophy which explains each of them in turn and does not merely generalise from one of them. This I have found in the Catholic philosophy; but that is not the question here, except in so far as there is, I think, just this difference: that the largeness of the other schemes is an unreal largeness of generalisation, whereas the largeness of our scheme is a real largeness of experience. Anybody can say that all Africans are black, but it is not the same as having a wide experience of Africa.
This difference about the obvious in generalisation struck me sharply, and with some amusement, in a debate on Spiritualism in the Daily News. A well-known secularist said that it is all very well to say that scientific men and intelligent people accept Spiritualism; but (he added, as with a sort of hiss) remember that wise men for ages actually accepted Witchcraft. He returned more than once to this biting and blasting word; and the argument obviously was, “Modern spirit-rapping by men like Lodge may look very plausible and scientific; but a ghastly fate awaits you; you will be the derision of history; you will be compared to the brutal, brainless, bestially ignorant people who believed in Witchcraft. Ha, ha, how will you like that?”
Now all this makes me smile in a sad but broad-minded manner. Because it seems to me to be quite the other way. I am not by any means certain, one way or the other, that there is really such a thing as Spirit-rapping. I am absolutely certain that there is such a thing as Witchcraft. I impute a belief in it to common sense, to experience and the records of experience, and to a broad view of humanity as a whole. I impute disbelief in it to inexperience, to provincial ignorance, to local limitations, and all the vices that balance the virtues of Tooting. Common sense will show that the habit of invoking evil spirits, often because they were evil, has existed in far too vast a variety of different cultures, classes and social conditions to be a chance piece of childish credulity. Experience will show that it is not true that it disappears everywhere before the advance of education; on the contrary, some of its most evil ministers have been the most highly educated. Record will show that it is not true that it marks barbarism rather than civilisation; there was more devil-worship in the cities of Hannibal and Montezuma than among the Esquimaux or the Australian bushmen. And any real knowledge of modern cities will show that it is going on in London and Paris today.
The truth is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had their little local limitations, which are already breaking down. Wishing to expel the superhuman and exalt the human, they grossly simplified the human. The great Huxley (on whose name be praise) said in the innocence of his heart, “It may be doubted if any man ever really said, ‘Evil, be thou my good.’” He could not believe that any scepticism could touch common morality, by which he really meant Christian morality. But such innocence is also ignorance. Nothing is more certain than that certain highly lucid, cultivated and deliberate men have said, “Evil, be thou my good”; men like Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade. Please God they repented in the end, but the point is that they did pursue evil; not pleasure, or excess of pleasure, or sex or sensuality, but evil. And it is quite certain that some pursued it beyond the bounds of this world; and called evil forces from beyond. There is very good evidence that some of them got what they asked for.
Now a Catholic starts with all this realistic experience of humanity and history. A Spiritualist generally starts with the recent nineteenth-century optimism, in which his creed was born, which vaguely assumes that if there is anything spiritual, it is happier, higher, lovelier and loftier than anything we yet know; and so opens all the doors and windows for the spiritual world to flow in. But we think this is just as simple an ignorance as if an eighteenth-century sentimentalist, reading into Rousseau a notion that savage man is like Adam in Eden, had gone to live in the Cannibal Islands to be surrounded with happiness and virtue. He would be surrounded, perhaps, but in a more bodily and unpleasant sense. One sentimental fashion may assume there are no cannibals; another optimistic fashion that there are no devil-worshippers— or no devils. But there are. That is the fact of experience that is the key to many mysteries, including the mysterious policy of the Roman Catholic Church.
GIOTTO AND ST. FRANCIS
St. Francis of Assisi has been for ages a popular saint; in our own age he has for the first time been in some danger of being a fashionable saint. That sort of distinction of the drawing-rooms, which is said to have been a temptation rejected by many saints in their lifetime, which is certainly a peril besetting most popular preachers all their lives, has come at last to this popular preacher six hundred years after his death. It is natural that artists should be interested in the poet who was practically the founder of medieval and therefore of modern art. And it is only too true that, wherever we admit the artist, it is very difficult to exclude the aesthete. This sort of light literary fuss, though often sincere as a sentiment and even valuable as a tribute, is the very opposite of that sort of solid and traditional popularity which St. Francis had among countless generations of peasants. There is something about peasant traditions, and even about peasant legends, which knows how to keep close to the earth. It is a mark of true folklore that even the tale that is evidently wild is eminently sane. We see this in the most extravagant stories of the saints, if we compare them with the extravagant theories of the sophists and the sentimentalists. Take, for instance, that most beautiful attribute for which St. Francis is rightly loved throughout the modern world: his tenderness towards the lower animals. It is illustrated in medieval folklore by fancies but not by fads. It is impossible to imagine any fable more fabulous, in the sense of fantastic and frankly incredible, than the story of St. Francis making a business bargain with a very large and dangerous wolf; drawing up a legal document with carefully numbered promises and concessions from the party of the first part and the party of the second part; the wild beast solemnly lodging a legal affidavit by the number of times he nodded his head. And yet there is in that fairy-tale a rustic and realistic sagacity that comes from real relations with animals, and is therefore perhaps called by the picturesque name of horse-sense. It was not written by the modern monomaniac animal-worshipper. It is a pleasant story because the saint is considering the peasants as well as the wolf. St. Francis was not the sort of man to agree with the hypothetical Hindoo who would be slowly devoured by a Bengal tiger, and remain in a state of philosophical absent-mindedness, because tigers are quite as cosmic as Hindoos. The Christian common sense of St. Francis, even in this wild fable, seized on the vital fact; that men must be saved from wolves as well as wolves from hunger, or even more so, and that this could only be done by some sort of definite arrangement. And it does put its finger upon the difficulty; in the absence of communication and therefore of contract between men and beasts. It realises that a moral obligation must be a mutual obligation. St. Francis contemplating the mountain wolf, hits on the same point as Job contemplating the monstrous Leviathan: “Will he make a pact with thee?” That is a sort of solid popular instinct, which was never lost by the really popular saint, in spite of anything which strangers might stare at as his antics or his agonies. Men remembered that he had been a good friend to them as well as to birds and beasts; and the fact is still apparent in the most remote and extravagant rumours of him. It is in this that he differs from some of the rather unbalanced and unnatural humanitarians of modern times. As a matter of fact, St. Francis does not by any means stand alone among medieval or other saints in this protest and protection of animals against men; though he probably does stand alone in his poetical and imaginative power of stamping the memory of it in picturesque images on the popular mind. Some of the greatest medieval priests long before St. Francis, St. Anselm, for instance, were famous for demanding kindness to the brute creation; many of them, St. Hugh of Lincoln, for instance, had an even more eccentric taste in pets; for St. Hugh, instead of preaching to the birds, seems to have allowed a large bird to accompany him everywhere like a curate. But what is notable about this medieval theory of mercy is something ultimately mild and reasonable, however freakish was its expression; a comprehension of the common needs of common people, and a humanitarianism that did not exclude humanity. In that sense, it is the modern age that is the age of fanatics.
This fact of St. Francis becoming a modern fashion, after having been for so long a medieval tradition, might well arouse in his real admirers a fear of his cult becoming merely artistic in the sense of merely artificial. And yet, in spite of one or two incongruous interventions, this has not really taken place. It is perhaps the highest tribute to the truth and sincerity of St. Francis that even now he can keep his simplicity in the face of fashionable admiration; as the Franciscan in the story kept the fashionable crowd at a distance by playing antics on a seesaw. And this remarkable escape from the suffocation of sophistication is nowhere better expressed than in what still remains, even to the eye of the traveller—the naked nobility of his native town.
A traveller at all experienced in the ways of travellers, not to say of trippers, will approach the steep city of Assisi with some feelings of doubt and even of fear. He will know that the modern discovery of the medieval saint may yet be followed by disasters, more subtle than those which superstition has traced in the modern disinterment of the Egyptian king. He will know that there are things to which guide-books are not the best guides; which are seen better by solitary pilgrims than by sociable tourists; and, without any sort of superiority let alone misanthropy, he will have had experience already of places which crowds of visitors have made less worth visiting. He will know that quarrels not untouched by quackeries have insulted the great silence of Glastonbury; he will know that there is some truth in the report that a bustle of sight-seeing and a bawling for baksheesh has spoiled for many the spiritual adventure of Jerusalem. Knowing how many aimless aesthetes, how many irresponsible intellectuals, how many mere sheep of show and fashion follow this track through Italy, he may well fear to find obliterated the ancient simplicity of Assisi. But when he sees it, if I may answer for at least one among many such travellers, he will receive what I can only describe as a cool shock of consolation.
The city is founded upon a rock; the city is a rock; and it is too simple for anybody to spoil. It has proved practically impossible to paint or gild or pad or upholster or even to scratch that rock. In the main lines of it an austerity alone remains in the memory; and even the beauty of the milder landscape is itself austere. There may be, indeed there is, the usual accumulation in corners of the popular trinkets or traditional toys of devotion, which some people are so unfortunately fastidious as to resent; but that is not the sort of peril of which I am thinking, even from the point of view of those who would admit it to be in other ways perilous. It is not a question of any abuses among the ignorant or the innocent who look up to the saint; it is a question of the condescending culture that looks down to him; not a matter of importing idolatry into the institution of a patron saint; but a matter of patronising the patron. And though multitudes in this rather snobbish state of mind must have passed through so established a station of the Italian pilgrimage, they have not in fact left any trail behind them, as they have in so many similar places; the hills have forgotten them and their personalities have passed away with the smell of their petrol. St. Francis is still left alone with his own friars and mostly with his own friends; and especially with that great first friend who was his interpreter to the expanding civilisation that came after him; the friend who could express in images what Francis himself had always felt as imagery, or what we call imagination; the painter who translated the poet—Giotto.
The advance of art criticism is a continual retreat; it would seem in some strange manner destined to march perpetually backwards into older and older periods. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the critics had finally accepted the normality of the Ancient Greeks. By the end of the nineteenth century the critics were already inaugurating the novelty of the Ancient Egyptians. We must all, by this time, be familiar with expressions of admiration for the art of the Caveman, scrawled in rock and red ochre with an unmistakable spirit and even distinction of draughtsmanship; the cult of the prehistoric which has given a new meaning to the cult of the Primitives. It will soon seem perfectly natural to be talking about the modernised and decadent sophistication of the Second Stone Age as compared with the rich but well-balanced civilisation of the First Stone Age. The further we go back to explore, the more we find that is really worth exploring; and the nearer we are to the real primitive man, the further we are from the ape or even the savage. This being true even of the tremendous scope of the whole history of the human tribe, it is not to be wondered at that men have made the same discovery about the high and complex culture of Christendom. The spotlight of artistic interest and concentration has been steadily travelling backwards ever since I was a child. I can remember faintly that in my first years it was still felt as something of a paradox to maintain that the quaintness of Botticelli could be taken as seriously as the solid finish of Guido Reni; that Ruskin was still a revolutionist for preferring the dayspring of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century to the dregs of the Renaissance in the eighteenth. Even as late as that, for most people, Giotto was still not so much a Primitive as a primitive man. He was a sort of savage who had done some service by discovering that it was possible to scratch something resembling a rudimentary human figure on the walls of his cave. For most people all serious art still lay between Raphael and Reynolds. As I grew up, the Ruskinian revolution prevailed, and most men came to realise that Giotto was a great painter; but even those men generally regarded him as the first great painter. But now, in yet more recent times, the artists are yet more like archaeologists, in the sense of going back to what is yet more archaic. The change that has passed over the most recent phase of art criticism can be sufficiently suggested by this one case of Giotto. I referred somewhere, in the Ruskinian manner, to Giotto as the figure who stands at the beginning of Christian art. One of the most creative of modern sculptors, whom many would call a medievalist, wrote to assure me that Giotto stands at the end of Christian art; with something like a broad hint that Giotto brought it to an end.
The spotlight has moved further back, and is now illuminating what even Ruskin and the romantic medievalists would have regarded as a desert of dead and barbaric formalism; the true Dark Ages. Our Progressives are now bound with golden chains to the decline of Byzantium, rather than to the rise of Florence. It is quaint to think how little harm a blundering nickname need do in the long run. All the admirers of Gothic call it Gothic, though it was originally meant to stamp it as barbaric. And all the admirers of Byzantine call it Byzantine; though the very adjective is already in use as a symbol of stiff degradation and decline. The new theories about rhythm and design have done justice to the old pictures which the romantics regarded merely as diagrams or patterns. The change from Cimabue to Giotto is at least not so certainly an unmixed improvement as it appeared to the Victorian medievalists. There is, as it were, a new school of Pre-Raphaelites, who are not only pre-Raphael, but pre-Giotto. The shining figure of the shepherd no longer stands against a background of black and barbarous darkness; but in a sort of double light, in itself involving some of these subtler problems of balance and recurrence; having on his right hand the wide white daybreak of Rome and Assisi and Paris and all the West, and on his left the long and gorgeous golden sunset of the great city of Constantine.
But in truth this double light may make for a better enlightenment, both about Giotto and his master St. Francis. The two artistic movements, coming one after the other, have between them done some justice to two halves of medieval history, and an earlier and a later period of Christendom, both of which had been underrated and misunderstood. There is a sort of mathematical beauty in the harshness of Byzantine art which is only beginning to be understood; but there is none the less another and livelier kind of beauty in the more humanised art of the later Middle Ages; something suggestive of a moment when a dead design comes to life, or a pattern begins to move, or even to dance. Some humorist wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangle”, and a mystical theologian might find in it a profound significance touching the loves of the Trinity. In other words, the old abstract expression of divine beauty was the expression of a truth, but the other truth of its expression in the concrete was none the less true. Now what is true of the early abstract art and the humanistic revolution of Giotto, is equally true of the abstract theology and the humanistic revolution of Francis. Some modern writers on the first Franciscans talk as if Francis was the first to invent the idea of the Love of God and the God of Love; or at least was the first to go back and find it in the Gospels. The truth is that anybody could find it in any of the creeds and doctrinal definitions of any period between the Gospels and the Franciscan movement. But he would find it in the theological dogmas as he would find it in the Byzantine pictures, drawn out in stark and simple lines like a mathematical diagram, asserted with a sort of dark clarity for those who can appreciate the idea of logical content and balance. In the sermons of St. Francis, as in the pictures of Giotto, it is made popular by pantomime. Men are beginning to act it as in a theatre, instead of representing it as in a picture or a pattern. Thus we find that St. Francis was in many ways the actual founder of the medieval miracle play; and there is all this suggestion of a stiff thing coming to life in the tale of his contact with the Bambino, illustrated in one of Giotto’s designs. And thus we find in Giotto himself a quality unique and hardly to be repeated in history. It is a sense, not only of movement, but of the first movement. There is still something in his figures that suggests that they are like the pillars of a church moved by the spiritual earthquake of a divine visitation, but even so moved slowly and with a sort of reluctant grandeur. The figures are still partly architectural while the faces are alive with portraiture. This first moment of motion has much to do with that sense of morning and youth which so many admirers of medievalism have felt, and which I shall continue to feel, with all respect to the medievalist sculptor. Nothing is nearer to the nerve of primal wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, than that strange saying of the blind man in the Gospels, that when he was half awakened to sight, he saw “men as trees walking.” There is something about the figures of Giotto that suggests men as trees walking. The Byzantine School will not permit me to say that before his eyes were thus opened, the artist had been wholly blind. But I will still maintain that there was something like a miracle, in the transition from treating trees as tracery and men as trees, to the realisation of the new shock of liberation; and how, at the word of God, they could arise and walk.
And here again we strike the parallel between the artist and the saint. The followers of St. Francis were, above all things, men who could walk. Many of them even walked with that sort of dazed unfamiliarity and doubtful balance, being suddenly robbed by a whirlwind of all the props of property. But they walked, because a new spirit of walking, and even of wandering, had entered into the static scheme of medieval Christianity; just as a new spirit of gesture and drama had entered into the static scheme of decorative art. The difference between the Friars and the Monks was, after all, that the Friars now walked like men where the Monks had once stood like statues. I mean nothing but admiration for the Benedictine monks, as for the Byzantine mosaics: or, for that matter, the grand and almost grim rationality of the great abstract dogmas. But there had come upon these flat and spacious things, carved in stone or ordered like statues, a new depth or dimension; a new quality of drama and motion. The popular propaganda of St. Francis, throwing thousands of wandering friars out into roads of the world, was the beginning of what we call the modern spirit; the spirit of romance and experiment and earthly adventure. For once a modern phrase which is much misused, may be rightly used. The Benedictines were, in the exact sense, an Order; as the plan of a cathedral is an Order. The Franciscans were, in the exact sense, a movement. Historically, perhaps, the most interesting of the great pictures by Giotto which are displayed in the Upper Church of Assisi, is that which commemorates the famous dream of the great Pope Innocent the Third; in which he saw the strange beggar, from whom he had almost turned away in the street, upholding the whole toppling load of St. John Lateran, and indeed, in a larger symbolism, the whole load of St. Peter and the Church founded on a rock. More than one historian has suggested that, humanly speaking, it was St. Francis who prevented all Christendom from coming to an end under the double destructive drive and drag of Islam without and the pessimist heresies within. This particular picture is also worth noting, as a perfect example of that solidity which marked the simplicity of the medieval mind. Modern writers have referred often enough to medieval dreams and dark clouds and dim mystical fancies. But in fact the medievals never dealt in these things, even where they would have been justified in dealing in them. There is scarcely any modern of any school, who could deliberately draw a picture of a vision in the watches of the night, especially a vision so very visionary, so transcendental and so tremendously symbolic, as that of an unknown saint upholding a universal church, without bringing into the picture some shadow of unreality, or remoteness, of a lurid halo of the preternatural; at least of mystery and the tints of twilight. But the medieval dream is more solid than the modern reality. The medieval artist has dealt with it with a directness which belongs to the vigorous realism of innocence and of childhood; the sort of actuality which has been wholly untouched by the many sorts of scepticism which masquerade as mysticism. The dream is full of something very extraordinary, something which did indeed, for those who can understand it, shine on the evil and the good throughout the epoch that we call the Dark Ages: broad daylight.
In another sense, however, the spirit illuminating these great medieval designs is not so much generally the spirit of daylight as in a rather curious and peculiar sense, the spirit of daybreak. Of that highly medieval design it is true to say something of what Keats said of the highly classical design of his Grecian Urn. It is a sort of immortal moment of morning, and that which is a mere transition in time fixed as an absolute for eternity. We are so accustomed, in modern times, to think in terms of what we call progress, that we seldom admit, except in a poetical parenthesis, that there is such a thing as a perfect moment which is better than what comes after, as well as better than what went before. Yet it might well be maintained that art in all its history had no better moment, either before or after, than this in which all that was good in the old framework and formalism still remained with the upstanding strength of a great building, but in which there had already entered that rush of life and growth, which had turned it into something like a forest, without having as yet turned it into anything like a jungle. The naturalistic spirit of the nineteenth century, when it first began to understand the genius of Giotto or St. Francis, as interpreted by the talent of Ruskin or of Renan, was bound to fasten especially on the fanciful and charming episode of the Sermon to the Birds. For that generation was less concerned about the preservation of churches and more about the preservation of birds, even if it were in the equivocal sense of the preservation of game. It would be easy to illustrate the whole development, we might even say, the whole ascent and descent, under the emblem or example of the bird. The birds of the primal and symbolic epoch were simplified and somewhat terrible: as in the Eagle of the Apocalypse or the Dove of the Holy Ghost. All other birds in the Byzantine scheme would have been as abstract and typical as the birds of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. The birds of the later realistic epoch, when the painters of the nineteenth century had brought to the last perfection, or the last satiety, the studies of optics or of physics begun in the sixteenth, might well have been a most detailed and even bewildering display of ornithology. But the birds to whom St. Francis preached, in the vision of the thirteenth-century art, were already birds that could fly and sing, but not yet birds that could be shot or stuffed; they had ceased to be merely heraldic without becoming merely scientific. And as, in all studies of St. Francis, we always return to that great comparison which he at once denied with all his humility and desired with all his heart, we may say that they were not wholly unlike those strange birds in the legend, which the Holy Child pinched into shape out of scraps of clay, and then started into life and swiftness with a clap of His little hands.
THE NEW GROOVE
The Poet Tennyson, like a true Victorian, must have written a good many of his poems in the train; travelling by railroad being the chief invention and institution of his age. Indeed he confesses to have written the poem of Lady Godiva while waiting for the train; and to judge by the careful construction of the blank verse the train must have been very late. But there are other Tennysonian lines which Tennyson would seem to have written while he was asleep in the train. They have that peculiar mixture of jumble and jingle familiar to those who go to sleep in trains and only feel the metallic rhythm of the wheels mingling with the most shapeless and senseless dreams. It was at some such moment of profound slumber that Lord Tennyson composed the more progressive and prophetic portions of Locksley Hall; and this is clearly proved by the convincing, nay, damning, fact that one of the lines does really and truly run:
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Psychologists will be interested in the curious displacement of words and disorder of ideas, which is characteristic of sentences invented in a dream. To the ordinary waking intelligence the words would appear to have no meaning. Grooves do not change; they do not necessarily ring; they do not even ring the changes. But, just as a sleeper in a railway-carriage will murmur, in the shock of awakening, some sentence betraying a secret he would probably have concealed if awake; as that he is travelling first-class with a third-class ticket, or that the corpse of a creditor is concealed under the seat— so Tennyson, in this very extraordinary line of verse, did really betray the secret, and even the crime, of his own intellectual world and most of the world that has come after it.
For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change. And it is, as I say, a revealing fact that even when the modern poet wishes to describe change, even when he wishes to glorify change, he does still instinctively describe it as a groove. This is a mark that has been left on very much of the modern world, ever since the beginning of the mechanical and industrial epoch. But it had its first and clearest form in this fixed conception of travelling by rail. It may be specially noted that we speak of the modern mind being in a groove rather than in a rut. A rut was a term commonly used of a cart-track; in the simple times when we did not put the cart before the horse. When a living thing went before us there was something of doubt or adventure or hesitation in the tracks it made for itself, even if they became grooves for others. There were strange curves in his course who hitched his wagon even to a horse, and who had not yet given up horses for horsepower. There were sometimes very wild and fantastic tracks in his, who hitched his wagon to a star. But, apart from all such figures or fancies, the essential peculiarity of the groove is that there can be nothing new about it except that it may take us to new places, or possibly take us past new places, at an entirely new rate of speed. That is the essential of what I mean by the modern groovings; that its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards.
Let us take, for the sake of clarity, this familiar case of the railway-train. A history of the locomotive steam-engine has often been presented in all its stages of improvement; the evolution of the modern train from the first clumsy models of Puffing Billy. But the engine did not produce anything but faster and faster engines; and the vital point is that nobody ever expected that it would. Nobody, even in a flight of fancy, wondered whether it would develop in any other direction, except the direction of its own groove. For instance, nobody ever suggested that it might develop its own type of architecture, so that the building of cars or carriages should be like the building of temples or town-halls. Yet there might perfectly well have been four or five schools of architecture for the designing of trains, as there are for the designing of temples. It would be a pleasing fancy if the architectural style of the train varied according to the country it was crossing or visiting. The Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York is a noble and serious piece of architecture; and it is really a sort of salute to the great city of Philadelphia towards which its gates are set. It might quite well have fallen out that what was done for the station could be done for the steam-engine; and the very design and colour of the vehicle vary according to whether it was going to the old French cities or the Red Indian plains; to the snows of Alaska or the orange-groves of Florida. Indeed I think there would have been much poetic symbolism in a hundred forms, probably guarded by rituals and dedicated to gods or patron saints, if it had so happened that the steam-engine was discovered by ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, and not by the Philistines of the Victorian time. But the point is here that nobody ever thought of such things; and certainly nobody thought of testing the progress of the train by such tests. There was only one test of the train and that was the test of the groove; of the smoothness of the groove; of the straightness of the groove; of the swiftness with which it travelled along the groove. There was something, in the tone of the whole thing, that prevented even mere fancy from breaking away in any other direction; or wondering, even vainly, if it could ever carry a castle like an elephant or a figurehead like a ship.
Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that. what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world. It is in the most exact sense of the term limited. It is all in one dimension. It is all in one direction. It is limited by its progress. It is limited by its speed.
I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop. If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations. For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance. Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from. Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense. Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all. They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time. What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as “the ringing groove of change”. Take, in this matter of current phrases, the example of the controversy about advanced and futuristic art. I do not mean to consider the art but to consider the controversy; as illustrating what has been said about the advisability of stopping and the stupidity of the non-stop train.
Now although, of course, the actual masses are quite unconverted to Picasso or Epstein, yet the terms of controversy, the only tags of argument known to the newspapers, the only familiar and almost popular sophistries outside mere popular abuse, are on the side of the new schools. I mean that modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change. Whichever side may be really right in the question of art (which obviously depends largely on the particular artists), the whole modern world is verbally prepared to regard the new artist as right and the old artist as wrong. It is prepared to do so by the whole progressive philosophy; which is often rather a phraseology than a philosophy. The language which comes most readily to everyone’s mind is the language of innovation; but it is a language that is rather exercised than examined. For instance, it is probable that more people are even now acquainted with the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats than with the poems of Miss Edith Sitwell. But many, many more people understand what Miss Sitwell means, when she simply says that she is criticised in her day as Keats was criticised in his day, than could possibly understand what Mr. Yeats means, when he says that nothing quite new can be used in poetry; or that innocence is only born out of ceremony and custom. For the former argument is a familiar argument of all modern progressives and reformers; the latter sayings are very profound sayings of a man who really thinks for himself. I agree that in many other things, and especially in the best examples of her poetry, Miss Sitwell also can think for herself. I only say that this particular argument (“John the Baptist was laughed at and I am laughed at”; “Galileo was disbelieved and I am disbelieved”)—this particular argument is part of the regular recognised bag of tricks of reformers and revolutionists; it is a part of the very old apparatus of the New Movement. Now if we apply this, for instance, to the quarrels about painting or sculpture we shall find the same situation: that, whichever side is right, the whole apparatus of modern talk favours the idea that the new thing is always right. There are a definite selection of phrases used, but not often examined. For instance, should any Philistine faintly protest against Helen of Troy being sculptured with a head of the exact shape of the Great Pyramid, or Titania with a figure following the grand simple lines of the hippopotamus at the zoo, or even perhaps his own favourite daughter presenting herself to the public in the appealing and even touching condition of having her nose and eyelids cut off— whenever such a criticism is heard, whether it be right or wrong, it will be answered with the precision of clockwork, by a phrase to the effect that some people want art to be “pretty-pretty”. Now the first act of any independent mind will be to criticise this criticism; and especially to feel a curiosity about the curious form of it. Why does everybody say, “pretty-pretty”? Why not say that some people do not like what is “ugly-ugly”, or possibly what is “beastly-beastly”? What is the meaning of this weird repetition, like a recurring decimal? If you have the sort of independent curiosity that stops at wayside stations, if (in short) you are not merely in a hurry to get to the fashionable terminus, you may well pause upon a phrase like that, not without profit. You will perceive that the phrase is, in fact, a rather pathetic attempt to reproduce the wondering exclamation of a child. And that would be alone enough to destroy the argument. For a child has a very sound sense of wonder at what is really wonderful; and by no means merely a vulgar and varnished taste in what is conventionally beautiful. The thing that a genuine child might call “pretty-pretty” is not the soapy portrait of a débutante or an upholstered group of a royal family; it is much more likely to be a flash of red fire or the strong colours of a great garden flower or something that really is elemental and essential; something in its way quite as “stark” (as our dear friends would say) as the Great Pyramid or the great pachyderm. Children are not snobs in art any more than in morals. And if they often have also a pleasure in things that are really “pretty”, in the sense of a graceful girl by Greuze or a cloud of pink blossom in spring, it is simply because there is a perfectly legitimate place in art for what is pretty; and it is not in the least disposed of by jabbering the same word twice over and calling it “pretty-pretty”. Anyhow, the more supercilious moderns make a bad blunder in imputing childishness in defence of some things that could only be defended as being in the higher sense childish. It was Cezanne himself who said, “I am trying to recover the direct vision of a child.”
It is the same with all the cant phrases already in circulation, for the purpose of defending any eccentricity, even before it exists. Thus everybody is familiar with the phrase that art is not photography, and that only photography is required to be realistic. Everybody is familiar with the phrase, and nobody is familiar with the holes or errors in the phrase. As a matter of fact nothing is less realistic than photography. At the very start it is cut away from all reality exactly as marble sculpture is cut away from reality, by being conventionally colourless; by divorcing the great optical union of colour and form. But it is not really realistic even about form. The thing it does reproduce more or less realistically is light and shade, and the light often falsifies the form and always falsifies the colour. If we want true form it must be drawn for us more or less abstractedly by a draughtsman; and when it is so drawn by Leonardo or Michelangelo, it cannot be dismissed as photographic, any more than as “pretty-pretty”. The modern artist may have his own reasons for drawing legs as if they were bolsters or sausages; but that does not make the strong sweeping lines, of sloping bone or gripping muscle, in a great Florentine drawing, a dull mechanical reproduction, valuable only as the vulgar snapshot of a trivial fact. Those lines are strong and beautiful, as the lines of waterfall and whirlpool are beautiful. In fact, they are exactly like the beautiful abstract forms, which the modern artist would like to invent— if he could.
I have taken only this one type, of the talk about new schools of art, to illustrate what I mean by saying that the world is in such a hurry to be new that it does not even pause upon the truths of the new school, let alone of the old. Of the million men and women who have heard those two phrases, how many have heard any phrases out of the opposite phraseology and philosophy? I mean any which offer a philosophical defence of the other philosophy? Of all those who have been told (somewhat needlessly) that Epstein does not profess to be pretty, how many have heard that case for civilisation, in which its very strength is shown in being able to rear and poise and protect prettiness? The very cyclopean massiveness of the foundations of the city is best proved in the fact that no earthquake can shake the ivory statuette upon the pedestal or the china shepherdess upon the shelf. How many have considered the more ancient argument, of a culture that is sufficiently athletic to be elegant? Or, to take another example, how many have understood the scientific and psychological arguments for antiquity itself? Of all those who can recall being told to admire a modern picture, merely because it is even more unlike life than a photograph, or being told to admire modern poetry, for no reason whatever except that it is more prosaic than slang— of all those, how many even remember the sound remark made long ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes; that the grand Latin poets actually grow grander by being quoted again and again; that the words actually grow together with time, as do the sections of a seasoned violin? I am not saying that the truth is all on the side of tradition; I am only saying that the publicity is all on the side of innovation. Until the recent rise of the Humanist group in America, hardly anybody, even of the educated classes, possessed even the vocabulary for a defence of tradition. The very words in use, the very structure of the sentences, the ordinary tone of the whole public Press, prevented me from using the real and reasonable arguments against mere novelty. England, strangely enough, has even less of a working Humanist vocabulary than America. Here also working journalistic ethics have been too much cut down and simplified to a few crude ideas, of commercial activity or continuous reform. I shall be completely misunderstood if I am supposed to be calling for a return ticket to Athens or to Eden; because I do not want to go on by the cheap train to Utopia. I want to go where I like. I want to stop where I like. I want to know the width as well as the length of the world; and to wander off the railway-track in the ancient plains of liberty.
THE REAL DR. JOHNSON
It is possible that there are still people in England who do not adore Dr. Johnson. These persons must be removed, if possible, by persuasion. A short and plain attempt to persuade them must take precedence of subtler questions in every discussion of the great man. Now this old and superficial misunderstanding of Johnson (now nearly extinct) expresses itself in two main popular notions— that he was pedantic and that he was rude. He occasionally was rude; he never was pedantic. He was probably the most unpedantic man that ever lived; certainly you and I are much more pedantic than Dr. Johnson. For pedantry means the worship of dead words; and his words, whether long or short, were always alive. He played long words and short words against each other with impromptu but infallible art. I am far from books, and I quote from memory, but I think that a Scotchman, vexed at the ritual jeers of Johnson against his country, said: “Do you remember that God made Scotland?” Johnson replied promptly: “Sir, you are to remember that he made it for Scotchmen.” Then, after a pause, he said in grave meditation: “Comparisons are odious; but God made hell.” Now the vague popular opinion of Johnson would concentrate on long words like “comparisons” and “odious”, and retain the impression that he was pedantic. It would be just as easy to concentrate on words like “hell” and give the impression that he was vulgar. The only true way of testing the matter is to look at the whole sentence and ask oneself if there is a single word, long or short, out of its place. Johnson was the reverse of pedantic, for he used long words only where they would be effective. Generally it came to this, that he spoke pompously when Boswell spoke flippantly and flippantly when Boswell spoke pompously—a very sound rule. When Boswell confronted him with the brute facts of a lonely tower and a baby, he answered, with distant dignity: “Sir, I should not much like my company.” But when Boswell justified some morally backsliding bishop or vicar with that elaborate hash of sophistry and charity which is still used to excuse the rich, Johnson answered him with a few short words, so full of Christianity and common sense that I should not be allowed to print them.
The charge of rudeness is much more real; but about this also an impression still surviving requires a great deal of correction. Taken in conjunction with the charge of pedantry, it has created the image of a bullying schoolmaster, a superior person who thinks himself above good manners. Now Johnson was sometimes insolent, but he was never superior. He was not a despot, but exactly the reverse. It was his sense of the democracy of debate that made him loud and unscrupulous, like a mob. It was exactly because he thought the other men as clever as himself that he sought in desperate cases to bear them down by clamour. Everyone knows the brilliant description of him by one of his best friends: “If his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt of it.” But few realise that this is the act of a simple and heroic fellow fighting against a superior force. Johnson was a man of great animal impulsiveness and of irregular temper, but intellectually he was humble. He always went into every conflict with the idea that the other man was as good as he was, and that he might be defeated. His bellowings and bangings of the table were the expressions of a fundamental modesty. We can feel this element, I think, in everything he said, down to those last awful words upon his death-bed, when he spoke of Burke, the one man who had really excited and arrested him, “If I saw him now it would kill me.” His fate in these respects has been strange. He has been called the pedant par excellence because he was the one thoroughly unpedantic person of a pedantic age. He has been called a conversational tyrant, because he was the one man of his mental rank who was ready to argue with his inferiors. On the one hand it is often said that he translated English into Johnsonese. But let it be remembered that he was the only man of his time who could translate Johnsonese back into English. Half a hundred critics in that age might have said of a play, “It does not possess sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction”, but only Johnson could have said also, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.” There were numerous great men in the eighteenth century who kept a club or court of dependents, where they had things entirely their own way. I need not prove the point; the greatest satirist of that age has made the image immortal.
Like Cato gave his little Senate laws, And sat attentive to his own applause.
But Johnson was the reverse of attentive to people who were applauding him. Johnson was furiously deaf to people who were contradicting him. So far from being a stately and condescending king like Atticus, Johnson was a kind of Irish member in his own Parliament. All these are but broken and incidental examples; everything about the man rang of reality and honour; he never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon. We have all heard enough to fill a book about Dr. Johnson’s incivilities. I wish they would compile another book consisting of Dr. Johnson’s apologies. There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong; and Johnson behaved very well. He understood (what so many faultlessly polite people do not understand) that a stiff apology is a second insult. He understood that the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. Boswell once complained to him in private, explaining that he did not mind asperities while they were alone, but did not like to be torn to pieces in company. He added some idle figure of speech, some simile so trivial that I cannot even remember what it was. “Sir,” said Johnson, “that is one of the happiest similes I have ever heard.” He did not waste time in formally withdrawing this word with reservations and that word with explanations. Finding that he had given pain, he went out of his way to give pleasure. If he had not known what would irritate Boswell, he knew at least what would soothe him. It is this gigantic realism in Johnson’s kindness, the directness of his emotionalism, when he is emotional, that gives him his hold upon generations of living men. There is nothing elaborate about his ethics; he wants to know whether a man, as a fact, is happy or unhappy, is lying or telling the truth. He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder, but he can walk into the heart without knocking.
RABELAISIAN REGRETS
There has arisen in our time an extraordinary notion that there is something humane, open-hearted or generous about refusing to define one’s creed. Obviously the very opposite is the truth. Refusing to define a creed is not only not generous, it is distinctly mean. It fails in frankness and fraternity towards the enemy. It is fighting without a flag or a declaration of war. It denies to the enemy the decent concessions of battle; the right to know the policy and to treat with the headquarters. Modern “broad-mindedness” has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavours to win without giving itself away, even after it has won. It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor. For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.
In the things of conviction there is only one other thing besides a dogma, and that is a prejudice. If there is something in your life for which you will hold meetings and agitate and write letters to the newspaper, but for which you will not find the plain terms of a creed, then that thing is properly to be described as a prejudice, however new or noble or advanced it may seem to be. But indeed I think that when these ages are seen in proper perspective, men will say that the chief mark of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the growth of vast and victorious prejudices. I give, in passing, some instances of what I mean. Thus, for instance, it is a brave and logical creed which declares, like Mahomet and some modern Puritans, that the drinking of fermented liquor is really wrong. But the modern world has not adopted this clear creed and never will. What it has done has been to spread everywhere a strong but vague prejudice against certain forms of drinking, particularly those adopted by the poor. We have not made it wicked to drink ale, but we have made it slightly disreputable to go into a public-house. In other words, we have made it slightly disreputable, if you drink ale, to be poor or to be sociable. What it comes to is this: that any one wishing to sneer at me can get a laugh by saying I am a beer-drinker, but he will not commit himself to the statement that the thing that he has sneered at is wrong. He may hit me, because he is appealing to a prejudice; but I may not hit him because he is not appealing to a creed. He will not set anything up for me to hit. He wants, somehow or other, to avoid calling liquor wrong and yet to call me wrong for touching liquor. This is not latitudinarianism; it is ordinary human cowardice.
There are a great many other instances which could be given. For instance, fashionable opinion does not actually declare (as do, I believe, certain Eastern religions) that ablutions and bodily cleanliness are primary things, above even ordinary morals; but it does create a loose popular impression that it has scored off a personality or a nation more by saying that it is dirty than by saying that it is avaricious or timid or unchaste. No new creed is preached about cleanliness, but a strong sentimental emphasis and partiality is attached to the thing, making it more important than other things. Of course cleanliness is only made so very important at present because it happens to be a thing quite easy for the rich and very difficult for the poor. My only concern here, however, is to point out the method by which it has been made important; never by explaining or defining its importance, as in a creed; always by assuming its importance, as in a prejudice. I have no space to go at length into other examples, but the reader can easily put the cases to himself; and he can employ this general test: that in the case of half the most typical movements of the last thirty years, nobody can say how or when they really began. In no barbaric twilight or tangled forest or confusion of the dark ages did huge forces ever come so silently or secretly into the world as they come to-day. No one knows or can name the real beginning of Imperialism or of the popularity of the Royal Family (a thing quite recent yet quite untraceable), or of the taking for granted, in so many minds, of the materialist philosophy or of the practical imposition of teetotalism as a discipline on the Nonconformist public ministry. These things come out of the night and are formless even when they are forming everything else.
But discussions on the subject of the Censor and other theatrical problems have brought before the public a supreme instance of what I mean. We have been asked for the hundredth time to find some solution of that problem of the combination in art of truth with sexual modesty; and the result of considering this has been that we find ourselves face to face with a profound and most important change in public opinion on this subject; a change that has been going on, perhaps, for the last twenty years, perhaps ever since the coming of the Puritans; but a change which is, at any rate, of the utmost import to the wholesomeness of ethics, and a change which has proceeded in the same powerful silence as the growth of a tree. It is this difference between new English and old English ethics in the matter of verbal delicacy of which I wish to speak here. The subject is difficult, it is even emotional and painful; and I think it will do no harm to begin with some of the general human principles of the problem, even if they are as old and obvious as the alphabet.
There is not really much difference of opinion among normal men about the first principles of decency in expression. All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane. There are people, indeed, who maintain that they would talk of this topic as coldly or openly as of any other; there are people who maintain that they would walk naked down the street. But these people are not only insane people, they are in the most emphatic sense of the word stupid people. They do not think; they only point (as children do) and say “Why?” Even children only do it when they are tired; but exactly this tired quality is most of what passes in our time not only for thought but for bold and disturbing thought. To ask, “Why cannot we discuss sex coolly and rationally anywhere?” is a tired and unintelligent question. It is like asking, “Why does not a man walk on his hands as well as on his feet?” It is silly. If a man walked systematically on his hands, they would not be hands, but feet. And if love or lust were things that we could all discuss without any possible emotion they would not be love or lust, they would be something else—some mechanical function or abstract natural duty which may or may not exist in animals or in angels, but which has nothing at all to do with the sexuality we are talking about. All the ideas of grasp or gesture, which to us make up the meaning of the word “hand”, depend upon the fact that hands are loose extremities used not for walking on but for waving about. And all that we mean when we speak of “sex” is involved in the fact that it is not an unconscious or innocent thing, but a special and violent emotional stimulation at once spiritual and physical. A man who asks us to have no emotion in sex is asking us to have no emotion in emotion. He has forgotten the subject-matter with which he deals. He has lost the topic of the conversation. It may be said of him, in the strict meaning of the words, that he does not know what he is talking about.
And if men have never doubted that there should be a decorum in such things, neither have they ever doubted that that decorum might be carried much too far; that courage and laughter and wholesome truth might be sacrificed to the proprieties. So far, I say, humanity is essentially unanimous. It is in the discussion as to which thing shall be suppressed and which permitted, in the selection of the more harmless from the more harmful types of candour, that we begin to find the difference between different civilisations and different religions among men. And it is exactly upon the point of such a difference as this that I wish to speak here. Among other societies and ages our own society and age has made a choice in this matter. We have said, substantially by a general feeling, that one kind of expression shall be allowed and another rendered impossible. We have chosen, and I think we have chosen wrong.
Before going deeper into this most difficult subject there is at least one general statement to be made. The evil of excess in this matter really consists of three quite separate evils. Verbal impropriety or excess can spring from three quite different motives, three quite different states of mind, which have really very little to do with each other. It is necessary to unpick these three strands before we go any further. Ordinary popular discussion of the problem always hopelessly mixes them up. Briefly, they may be stated thus: impropriety arises either from a really vicious spirit, or from the love of emphasis, or from the love of analysis.
The first can be dismissed with brevity and with relief. There is such a thing as pornography; as a system of deliberate erotic stimulants. That is not a thing to be argued about with one’s intellect, but to be stamped on with one’s heel. But the point about it to be noted for our purpose is that this form of excess is separated from the other two by the fact that the motive of it must be bad. If a man tries to excite a sex instinct which is too strong already, and that in its meanest form, he must be a scoundrel. He is either taking money to degrade his kind or else he is acting on that mystical itch of the evil man to make others evil, which is the strangest secret in hell.
But when we come to the two motives of emphasis and of analysis, it is essential to observe that in both cases the motive may be beautiful, even when the result is most disastrous. The motive for impropriety arising out of emphasis can be best illustrated by a comparison with the habit of swearing. Swearing is, of course, the strongest possible argument for the religious view of life. A man cannot satisfactorily affirm anything about this world except by getting out of this world. The things commonly called fables are so true that they alone can give final ratification even to the things commonly called facts. A man in Balham cannot even call his dog a good dog without summoning to his aid either the angels or the devils. The Balhamite, like the Roman, if he cannot bend the gods will move Acheron; but he never thinks of trying to move Balham. Religion is his only resort for purposes of real emphasis; and often, even when he is attacking religion, his instinctive way of attacking it is to say that it is a damned lie. The most natural way of talking is the supernatural way of talking. And indeed this may be considered a good working test for all modern fads and philosophies which pretend to be religions. The new faiths founded on evolution or an impersonal ethic are always claiming, that they also can produce holiness; and no Christian has any right in Christian charity to deny that possibility. But if the question really is whether the things in question are religions in the sense that Christianity or Mohammedanism are religions, then I should suggest a different test. I should not ask whether they can produce holiness, but whether they can produce profanity. Can any one swear by ethics? Can any one blaspheme evolution? Many men now hold that a mere adoration of abstract morality or goodness is the core and sole necessity of religion. I know many of them; I know that their lives are noble, and their intellects just. But (I say it with respect and even hesitation) would not their oaths be a little mild? I do not mean that they ought to swear, or that anybody ought to swear, I mean that if it comes to swearing one can see in such a competition the vast difference in actuality between the new sham religion which talks about the holiness within, and an old practical religion which worshipped a real holiness without. You can see the difference in the weakness of the oaths considered as literature. The man of the Christian Churches said (occasionally), “Oh, my God!” The man of the ethical societies says (presumably), “Oh, my goodness!”
It is generally true, I say, that the whole circle of this physical universe does not contain anything strong enough for the purposes of a man who really means what he says; even about a small dog. Yet there is one exception to this generalisation. There is one thing which belongs to this world, but which is yet so fierce and startling, so full of menace and ecstasy, that it seems at times to partake of the character of miracle. This thing is the thing called sex; and on this also from time to time the man with the small dog in Balham will call in his dire need. Men used to swear by their heads; they still in a manner swear by their bodies. Sex is actual enough to swear by. To take but one coarse democratic test, people scribble about it on walls as they do about religion. Nobody ever scribbled on a wall about ethics. Above all, the language of sex can be used as a kind of violent invocation; a reinforcement of common words by the strongest words. I will not pause here to ask the reason of this; whether saying “damn” and saying other things unprintable have something to do with the fact that sex is the great business of the body, and salvation the great business of the soul. It is enough to say that any one can read the thing I mean and any one can hear it. He can read the thing best perhaps in Aristophanes or in Rabelais. He can hear the thing best in the street outside.
But though he can find it in the street outside, he cannot find it in any of the books or newspapers sold in the street. There is no law against indecent ideas; but there is a quite efficient and practical law against indecent words. Slowly throughout the eighteenth century word after word was dropped until by the Victorian time it was insisted that no coarse phrases should be used even in defending coarseness. I am myself under the limitations of this very local prejudice. I am compelled to prove my case in many pages because I have to talk as one talks in a respectable magazine. I could prove my case in ten minutes if I could talk as two respectable married men really talk on the top of an omnibus. It is sufficient, however, to put the matter thus: When a navvy uses what is called obscene language it is almost always to express his righteous disgust at obscene conduct. And here the navvy is at one with all the most really masculine poets or romancers; he is at one with Rabelais, with Swift, and even with Browning. Browning uses a foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who profess sympathy with human sorrows merely out of their own morbidity. You can find the phrase in “At the Mermaid.” Browning uses the same foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who cannot understand a man’s prompt grasp of the presence of a good woman. You can find the phrase in the speech of Capponsacchi. In short, the emphatic use of sexual language has this great advantage that it is commonly used purely in the interests of virtue. The virtuous cabman may (and does) call a man a blank, in a state of furious and innocent horror at the idea of any one being a blank. But this is not true in the case of the third impulse to indecorum. The third impulse is that which I have called the analytical; the mere curiosity of the mind about how the relations of the sexes are to be considered and classified. This covers all that we now call the Problem Play, and all that we associate with the realistic and psychological novel, and all the millions of proposals for the rearrangement of marriage. The dialogue in The Little Eyolf horrified many people; but it did not contain a single coarse word. Mr. George Moore, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, and the lady called “Victoria Cross” have in turn been accused of being needlessly daring; but not one of them dare use words straight out of Bunyan or the Bible. The analytic indecency is now more free than it ever was among free men. The emphatic indecency is more stifled than it ever was among free men; more stifled than it ever was among slaves.
I am not concerned here to deny that the modern fashion of analysing sex is in general a good thing. Certainly there is grossly too much hypocrisy about sex; not in the English people, but in the literature and journalism which the English people, for some incomprehensible reason, permit to speak for them. There is no hypocrisy on the top of an English omnibus; but I warmly agree that there is really too much hypocrisy in the front page of an English newspaper, or within the covers of an English book. Let us agree that Ibsen had a right to suggest that marriage is an unpleasant fact as well as a pleasant one; that as well as the more chivalrous side of sex which is exaggerated by the Victorian poets, there is also the realistic and scientific side of sex, which was exaggerated by the old monks. Let me concede altogether and at once the fact that the modern tendency to dissect sex and to subdivide it, to put it into pigeon-holes, is a just and necessary measure. I will not even say here that the tendency has gone too far. But I will say this: what will you do if it does go too far? Suppose you wake up some fine morning and find indecencies which are quite ludicrous being taken quite seriously. Suppose you find certain sins put in a pigeon-hole when they ought to be put in a dust-hole. Suppose that after twenty years of scientific study you find that you have all the dirty jokes back again, the only difference being that you must enjoy them without laughing at them. Suppose, in short, that you are confronted with the exasperating spectacle of people chewing sins, instead of spitting them out of their mouths like their fathers; what will you do then? How will you express your feelings if you are faced with that horrible fashion of taking sex seriously—of which the true name is Phallic Worship? I know what you will do: you will call upon the shades of Rabelais and Fielding to deliver you out of that foul idolatry; and perhaps the English people will answer you and speak. It is common enough to talk of the English people speaking; but if ever they do speak they will speak as Rabelais spoke, and as English cabmen speak now.
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
“The Hound of Heaven”, the greatest religious poem of modern times and one of the greatest of all times, was produced under certain peculiar historical conditions, which accentuate its isolation. To begin with, the religious poem is a religious poem, not only in what we should call the real sense, but in what some would call the limited sense. The word “religion” is used in these days in an expansive or telescopic fashion, sometimes inevitable, sometimes nearly intolerable. It is used of various realms of emotion or spiritual speculation more or less lying on the borders of religion itself; it is applied to other things that have nothing to do with religion; it is applied to some things that are almost identical with irreligion. But the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean or can be made to mean we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts. For the latter it will be enough to realise that there certainly was and is a certain thing, to which our fathers found it more practical to attach and limit the name of religion; that they recognised that the thing had many forms, and that there were many religions; but that they were equally certain of what things were not religions, including much that modern moralists call a wider religious life. They recognised a Protestant religion and a Catholic religion, and probably thought one or other of them true; they recognised a Mohammedan religion, even if they thought it false; they recognised a Jewish religion, which had once been true and by a sort of treason had become false; and so on. But they did not recognise a religion of Humanity; or a “religion of the Life Force”: or a religion of creative evolution; or a religion which has the object of ultimately producing a god who does not yet exist. And the distinction is better preserved by noting these examples than by an attempt to fix the elusive evasions of the verbal sophists of today.
What we mean when we say that “The Hound of Heaven” is a real religious poem is simply that it would make no sense if we supposed it to refer to any of these modern abstractions, or to anything but a personal Creator in relation to a personal creature. It may be, and indeed is, a generous and charitable mood to look out on all the multitudes of men with sympathy and social loyalty. But it was not the multitudes of men that were pursuing the hero of this poem “down the nights and down the days”. It may be a good thing for men to look forward to mankind someday producing a superior being, thousands of years hence, who will be like a god compared with the common mass of men. But it was not some superior person born a thousand years hence, who drove the sinner in this story from refuge to refuge. He was not running away from the Life Force, from a mere summary of all natural vitality, which would be expressed equally in the pursued or the pursuer. For it requires quite as much Life Force to run away from anybody as to run after anybody. He was not swiftly escaping from a slow adaptive process called evolution, like a man pursued by a snail. He was not alarmed at a gradual biological transformation, by which a Hound of Heaven might be evolved out of a Hound of Hell. He was dealing with the direct individual relations of God and Man, and the story would be absolutely senseless to anybody who thought that the service of Man is a substitute for the service of God. This is where the practical habit of speech, among our religious ancestors of all religions, proves its validity and veracity. Francis Thompson was a Catholic, and a very Catholic Catholic. In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the solid central fact of the subject or subject-matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even from pagans; and all Christians have their part in him. A perfectly simple and straightforward member of the Salvation Army knows what “The Hound of Heaven” is about, even if he knows it better without reading it, and would recognise its central theology as promptly as the Pope. But the mere humanist, the mere humanitarian, the universal aesthete, the patroniser of all religions, he will never know what it is about, for he has never been near enough to God to run away from Him.
Now the next point of interest is that this poem of purely personal religion, so directly devotional, so dogmatically orthodox, appeared at a time when it might least be expected, and at the end of an historical process that might have seemed to make it impossible. The nineteenth century had been, at least on the surface, one triumphal procession of progress, away from these theological relations, which were accounted narrow, towards ideals of brotherhood or natural living which seemed to be more and more broad. We might say that the poets had led the procession, for even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Shelley and Landor and Byron and Keats had moved in various ways towards a pantheistic paganism; and the tendency was continued by Victor Hugo in Europe and by Walt Whitman in America. There were, of course, continual cross-currents and confusions. Even an appeal to pantheism is something like an appeal to theism, and it was difficult to imitate the pagans without discovering, like St. Paul, that they were very religious. The contradiction came out quaintly in the case of Swinburne, who was always trying to prove that he was an atheist by invoking about ten different gods in a style exactly copied from the Old Testament.
Roughly speaking, however, I myself remember fairly well the curious cultural conditions in which the genius of Francis Thompson arose; for, though I was a boy at the time, a boy can sometimes absorb the atmosphere of a society, with the same subtle subconscious instinct with which a child can absorb the atmosphere of a house. I read all the minor poets; and it was specially an age of minor poets. The curious thing is that Francis Thompson was considered, criticised, appreciated or admired as one of the minor poets. I can remember Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, who is one of the survivors of that epoch, defending himself with spirit, but with a certain air of audacity, against the charge of fulsome exaggeration in saying that there was in the poems of this Mr. Thompson an Elizabethan richness and sometimes almost a Shakespearian splendour. Mr. Le Gallienne was quite right; but the main point is that his defence was a general defence of minor poets, and of this poet as a minor poet. It had hardly occurred to the world in general that Francis Thompson was a major poet; we might almost say a major prophet. There was in all that world of culture an atmosphere of paganism that had worn rather thin. But hardly anybody thought that the future of poetry could be anything but a future of paganism. It was then, in the slowly deepening silence, as in the poem of Coventry Patmore, that there was first heard, afar off, the baying of a hound.
That is the primary point about the work of Francis Thompson; even before its many-coloured pageant of images and words. The awakening of the domini canes, the Dogs of God, meant that the hunt was up once more; the hunt for the souls of men; and that religion of that realistic sort was anything but dead. In Patmore’s poem the dog is “an old guard-hound”; and we may say, without irreverence, that the first impression or lesson was that there is life in the old dog yet. In any case, it was an event of history, as much as an event of literature, when personal religion returned suddenly with something of the power of Dante or the Dies Irae, after a century in which such religion had seemed to grow more weak and provincial, and more and more impersonal religions appeared to possess the future. And those who best understand the world know that the world is changed, and that the hunt will continue until the world turns to bay.
THE FRIVOLOUS MAN
By one of those queer associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious. Even those whom we commonly regard as belonging to the butterfly classes of society really enjoy themselves most at the crises of their lives which are potentially tragic. Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things. In order to enjoy even a pas de quatre at a subscription dance a man must feel for the moment that the stars are dancing to the same tune. In the old religions of the world, indeed, people did think that the stars were dancing to the tunes of their temples; and they danced as no man has danced since. But thorough enjoyment, enjoyment that has no hesitation, no incidental blight, no arrière pensée, is only possible to the serious man. Wine, says the Scripture, maketh glad the heart of man, but only of the man who has a heart. And so also the thing called good spirits is possible only to the spiritual.
The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that be is a pessimist. The idea of the gay and thoughtless man of fashion, intoxicated with pagan delights, is a figment invented entirely by religious people who never met any such man in their lives. The man of pleasure is one of the fables of the pious. Puritans have given a great deal too much credit to the power which the world has to satisfy the soul; in admitting that the sinner is gay and careless they have given away the strongest part of their case. As a matter of fact, Puritanism commonly falls into the error of accusing the frivolous man of all the wrong vices. For instance, it says (and it is a favourite phrase) that the frivolous man is “careless”. In truth the frivolous man is very careful. Not only does he spend hours over dressing and similar technical matters, but a great part of his life is passed in criticising and discussing similar technical matters. At any odd hour of the day we may find him talking about whether one man has the right kind of coat or another man the wrong kind of dinner-service; and about these matters he is far more solemn than a Pope or a General Council. His general air about them might be described as rather sad than serious, as rather hopeless than severe. Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.
Frivolity has nothing to do with happiness. It plays upon the surface of things, and the surface is almost always rough and uneven. The frivolous person is the person who cannot fully appreciate the weight and value of anything. In practice he does not appreciate even the weight and value of the things commonly counted frivolous. He does not enjoy his cigars as the gutter boy enjoys his cigarette; he does not enjoy his ballet as the child enjoys “Punch and Judy”. But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus, for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous, statesmen are generally frivolous, conscientious objectors are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fullness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour. The splendid and everlasting definition of real irreverence is to be found in that misunderstood and neglected commandment which declares that the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. This again is supposed vaguely to have some connection with buffoonery and jocularity and play upon words. But surely that is not the plain meaning of the phrase. To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scriptures of Elfland, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it— this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists. The blasphemer is, indeed, fundamentally natural and prosaic, for he speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be commonplace. But the ordinary preacher and religious orator speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be divine.
This is the breach of one of the Commandments; it is the sin against the name. Take, if you will, the name wildly, take it jestingly, take it brutally and angrily, take it childishly, take it wrongly; but do not take it in vain. Use a sanctity for some strange or new purpose and justify that use; use a sanctity for some doubtful and experimental purpose and stake your act on your success; use a sanctity for some base and hateful purpose and abide the end. But do not use a sanctity for no purpose at all; do not talk about Christ when you might as well talk about Mr. Perks; do not use patriotism and honour and the Communion of Saints as stopgaps in a halting speech. This is the sin of frivolity, and it is the chief characteristic of the great majority of the conventionally religious class.
Thus we come back to the conclusion that real seriousness is at a discount alike among the irreligious and the religious, alike in the worldly and in the unworldly world.
TWO STUBBORN PIECES OF IRON
In discussing such a proposal as that of the co-education of the sexes it is very desirable first of all to realise clearly what it is that we want the thing to do. The thing might be upheld for quite opposite reasons. It might be supposed to increase delicacy or to decrease it. It might be valued because it was a sphere for sentiment or because it was a damper for sentiment. My sympathies would move me in a discussion entirely according to what difference its upholders thought it would make. For myself, I doubt whether it would make much difference at all. Everyone must agree with co-education for very young children; and I cannot believe that even for elder children it would do any great harm. But that is because I think the school is not so important as people think it nowadays. The home is the really important thing, and always will be. People talk about the poor neglecting their children; but a little boy in the street has more traces of having been brought up by his mother than of having been taught ethics and geography by a pupil teacher. And if we take this true parallel of the home we can see, I think, exactly what co-education can do and what it cannot do. The school will never make boys and girls ordinary comrades. The home does not make them that. The sexes can work together in a school-room just as they can breakfast together in a breakfast-room; but neither makes any difference to the fact that the boys go off to a boyish companionship which the girls would think disgusting, while the girls go off to a girl companionship which the boys would think literally insane. Co-educate as much as you like, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down. Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexless camaraderie. It will be a place where boys go about in fives sulkily growling at the girls, and where the girls go about in twos turning up their noses at the boys.
Now if you accept this state of things and are content with it as the result of your co-education, I am with you; I accept it as one of the mystical first facts of Nature. I accept it somewhat in the spirit of Carlyle when somebody told him that Harriet Martineau had “accepted the Universe”, and he said, “By God, she’d better.” But if you have any idea that co-education would do more than parade the sexes in front of each other twice a day, if you think it would destroy their deep ignorance of each other or start them on a basis of rational understanding, then I say first that this will never happen, and second that I (for one) should be horribly annoyed if it did.
I can reach my meaning best by another route. Very few people ever state properly the strong argument in favour of marrying for love or against marrying for money. The argument is not that all lovers are heroes and heroines, nor is it that all dukes are profligates or all millionaires cads. The argument is this, that the differences between a man and a woman are at the best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest. To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of “Beauty and the Beast”. Every man has to find out that his wife is cross—that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else’s sanity.
This is not a digression. The whole value of the normal relations of man and woman lies in the fact that they first begin really to criticise each other when they first begin really to admire each other. And a good thing, too. I say, with a full sense of the responsibility of the statement, that it is better that the sexes should misunderstand each other until they marry. It is better that they should not have the knowledge until they have the reverence and the charity. We want no premature and puppyish “knowing all about girls”. We do not want the highest mysteries of a Divine distinction to be understood before they are desired, and handled before they are understood. That which Mr. Shaw calls the Life Force, but for which Christianity has more philosophical terms, has created this early division of tastes and habits for that romantic purpose, which is also the most practical of all purposes. Those whom God has sundered, shall no man join.
It is, therefore, a question of what are really the co-educators’ aims. If they have small aims, some convenience in organisation, some slight improvement in manners, they know more about such things than I. But if they have large aims, I am against them.
HENRY JAMES
An artist who is at once individual and complete attracts a type of praise which is a sort of disparagement; and even those who overrate him underrate him. For the tendency is always to insist on his art; and by art is often meant merely arrangement. Because a very few colours can be harmoniously arranged in a picture, it is implied that he has not many colours on his palette. And as a study by Henry James was often in its tones something of a nocturne in grey and silver, even his eulogists managed to imply something slight or even thin about his work. Before attempting to touch upon what was really peculiar in the tone of it, it is necessary to correct, and even to contradict, this tenuous impression by the reminder of what he had in common with other great writers. For Henry James must be considered as a great man of letters; and the greatness itself is something which existed in geniuses utterly unlike him. It might seem startling and even comic to compare him to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great, and what alone can make a literary man in the ultimate sense great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas. It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric with one really perfect image; but when we open any play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great man. We are taking at random from a whole store of what are truly to be called great inventions when we think of Mrs. Todgers’ wooden leg, or Mr. Fledgby’s nose, or Mr. Pecksniff’s pinions, or Mr. Swiveller’s double-bedded room.
And wide as the distance may seem, it is true, in exactly the same sense, that we are taking at random from a treasury of unique inventions when we think of any two or three of the numberless new ideas of Henry James; of the two people who grew afraid of the mystical coincidence of never meeting; of the man who ceased to exist when he was left alone; of the mysterious unity that ran through all a writer’s books like “the figure in the carpet”; of the pearls that were counted false for purposes of respectability and real for purposes of sale; of the sudden supernatural calm created like a garden in the skies by the breakdown of the brain at its busiest; of the wife who would not justify herself to her husband because his whole life was in his chivalry; and so on through a thousand more. Such an idea, though it may be as delicate as an atmosphere, is nevertheless as precise as a pun. It cannot be a coincidence; it is always a creation. He has been attacked for making a great deal of small things; but most of those who attacked him were making a great deal of large nothings. The point that is important about him is not whether the things with which he dealt were as small as some think them, or as large as he could make them; whether it was a fine shade in vulgarity or an occult tenacity of vice; whether it was the restless ten minutes of a visitor coming too early, or the restless ten years of a lover moved too late. The point is that the things were things; that we should have lost them if he had not given them; that no mere perfections of prose would have been a substitute for them; in short, that he never wrote about nothing. Each small notion had the serious thing called value— like a jewel, or, like what is both smaller and more valuable than a jewel, a seed.
His greatness is the greatest thing about him, therefore, and it is of a kind with that of other creative men. But when this large and rather neglected aspect has first been allowed for, it is possible to consider him as a peculiar and fastidious writer. Certainly his work is of a sort to which it is difficult to do justice amid the pulsation of the direct public energies with which most of us who are at all public-spirited feel ourselves concerned today. We should need to be at leisure in those large and vague spaces of gardens and great neglected houses which are the background of so many of his spiritual dramas, to grow fond of the fine shades of a whole science of shadows and slowly appreciate the multitudinous colours of what seems at first monochrome. Some of his finest stories were ghost stories; and one must be alone to meet a ghost. And yet even the phrase I use indicates its own limitations, for no one seized more swiftly than Henry James the greatness of this awful time, in which we have to think even of ghosts in crowds. He had always been in his innermost being a mystic, and the dead were near to him; and he rose more magnificently, perhaps, than any other to that hour in which the dead were so living and so near to us all. A unique purity and disinterestedness had always attended his pen, and he had the reward of it in realising moral proportion. He had never failed to see small things; nor did he fall into the more modern and enlightened error of failing to see big ones. He had no difficulty in adjusting his subtlety to the stupendous simplicity of a war for justice; his brain, like a Nasmyth hammer, had not unlearnt in a long course of tapping how to fall and shatter.
That he should feel the prodigy of the Prussian insult to mankind will only surprise those who have read him superficially; or perhaps only read his more superficial sketches. He by no means exhibits manners as more than morals; though he may exhibit manners as more than many would think them. In a story like The Turn of the Screw he has rather the character of a divine detective. The woman who probes the stagnant secret of the depraved boy and girl is resolved to forgive and, therefore, unable to forget. She is a kind of inquisitor; and her morality is altogether of the old thorough and theological sort. It is a summons to repent and die, rather than a vague capacity to die and repent. And when at the last the deliverance of the boy’s soul seems to be delayed by the appearance at the window of his evil genius, “the white face of the damned”, it is perhaps the one place in all modern literature where that monosyllable is not a joke. And it is strongly significant that men of any belief and no belief have universally fallen back on such phraseology to find terms for the sneering savagery of the present enemy of Christendom. Honest grey-haired atheists are found judging the Prussian upon the paradoxical principle that there may be heaven, there must be hell. And the nations can find nothing but the language of demonology to describe a certain poison of pride, which is none the less a tyranny because it is also a temptation.
Henry James always stood, if ever a man did, for civilisation; for that ordered life in which it is possible to tolerate and to understand. His whole world is made out of sympathy; out of a whole network of sympathies. It is a world of wireless telegraphy for the soul; of a psychological brotherhood of men of which the communications could not be cut. Sometimes this sympathy is almost more terrible than antipathy; and his very delicacies produce a sort of promiscuity of minds. Silence becomes a rending revelation. Short spaces or short speeches become overweighted with the awful worth of human life. Minute unto minute uttereth speech, and instant unto instant showeth knowledge. It is only when we have realised how perfect is the poise of such great human art that we can also realise its peril, and know that any outer thing which cannot make it must of necessity destroy it.
It has been customary to talk of Henry James’s American origin as something almost antagonistic to the grace and rarity of his art. I am far from sure that this is not to miss a fine and serious strain in it. There is an element of idealism in the American tradition, which is very well typified in the sincere and sometimes exaggerated external deference to women. This particular sort of purity in the perceptions, very marked in him, he had originally owed, I think, to something other than the more mellow and matured European life in which he came afterwards to take his deepest pleasures. The older civilisation gave him the wonderful things he wanted; but the wonder was his own. His attitude in private life remains for anyone who has seen it as something infinitely higher than politeness; an attitude towards things, and something that can only be called an impersonal reverence. Despite all their modernism, some of his love stories have a dignity that might be dressed in the clothes of an antique time. They should have moved upon high-terraced lawns among great and gentle ladies, and their squires who were something more than gentlemen. As Mr. Yeats says somewhere:
There have been lovers whose thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy, That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books.
The books of Henry James will always be beautiful; and I believe they are young enough to be old.
THE STRANGE TALK OF TWO VICTORIANS
The Faith always returns in a counter-attack; and it is generally not only a successful attack but almost always a surprise attack.
Here more than anywhere it is the unexpected that happens; the religion supposed to be rotting away slowly in unlettered peasantries was found present in pressing numbers in the new industrial towns; the creed compassionately tolerated in a few old sentimentalists is today making converts among the young almost entirely of the hard-headed logicians.
But this tendency to a reconciliation with intellectuals, once regarded as a reconciliation with irreconcilables, has produced, among other queer points in the position, this fact; that the newest group consists rather too much of those who are in a position to teach, while there is not yet a sufficient crowd, or larger public, of those who are in a position to learn. There is, for instance, a huge mass of material in Catholic history for very good novels or plays; and there are a considerable proportion of Catholics capable of writing them; but there is not yet a sufficient number of ordinary readers capable of reading them, in the sense of understanding them. This is especially true of the high historic quality of irony.
An Englishman realising the real religious history of his country constantly comes upon small social and political episodes, of which the irony is as grand as Greek tragedy; and then he remembers most of the other Englishmen, and has to own that it would be Greek to them. The very ironic point which gives him grim gratification would be quite pointless, because the public at large would probably take the suggestion quite seriously and never even see the joke.
So, till very lately at least, the public hardly saw the joke of talking about the Virgin Queen or the Glorious Revolution. You cannot have drama without a public; you cannot have irony without an instructed public.
I was wondering the other day whether anybody had thought of a play, or rather a scene, which could be a very fine scene written by anybody well read in eighteenth-century England. It might be called “Five Irishmen.”
Seated round a table in a coffeehouse (but conspicuously not drinking coffee) would be Goldsmith, an old Tory almost a Jacobite; Sheridan, a younger Whig almost a Jacobin; Burke, a Whig more alarmist than any Tory about disturbing the balance of the British Constitution (which he had largely made up out of his own highly imaginative head); Grattan, a Whig orator also, but native to the Irish Parliament; and (if he could be dragged in somehow) somebody more dangerous, like Lord Edward of Tone, foreshadowing the Irish Rebellion. All these men were Protestants. All, either in their own persons or through their families, could be traced back in some way to the time when it seemed that the heart of Ireland was broken; and for a man who did not abandon the Faith there was no normal hope on earth.
I think somebody could make a fine study, in several stages, of how layer after layer began to crack and that awful forbidden ancestral Thing rose slowly to overshadow them like a ghost. They would begin decorously, of course, probably discussing Catholic Emancipation with cold pagan liberality; and the wine and the words and the Irish passion for personal recrimination, and especially for family reminiscence, would bring strange things spouting from the depths; and through a wild scene I actually seemed suddenly to hear the high voice of Sheridan, shrill with intoxication, crying out some taunt: “Have ye forgotten that, O’Bourke?” And then I remembered that an audience in a London theatre would probably make nothing of the notion of that great eternal Thing terribly returning; because any number of them do not know that it is eternal and hardly that it is great.
In Edith Sitwell’s very graceful sketch of Queen Victoria, I came on another quaint little drama, which in this case would be a duologue. Also, in this case, the thing really happened. It is there described briefly and impartially; but anyone knowing persons and period can easily understand and expand it; and to me it is enormously amusing; amusing and also enormous. It has exactly that grim Greek irony of the contrast between great things known and the greater thing that is not known. It was a discussion, and even a dispute between two very eminent Victorians. It was concerned with the news of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
They were both good men; they were both men of the first prominence in the public eye. Both had the finest culture of the Protestant; both had a faint streak of the prig; but both had a warmth of generous conviction for their own favourite causes; neither certainly was a fool; neither was a No-Popery man in the narrow and vulgar sense; both believed themselves flooded with the full daylight of the age of enlightenment and liberty; and, at the same time, both had hobbies and intelligent interests that might soften them toward older religious traditions.
One was a great reader of the Fathers and the first devotional literature; the other had a genuine taste in what was still often regarded as the childish cheap jewellery of medieval painting. One was a High Churchman of the Oxford Movement; the other was a liberal Lutheran. One was the great Gladstone; the other was Albert, the Prince Consort.
The two men talked and disagreed. They sharply disagreed. The point on which they disagreed was extraordinary. But it was not a hundredth part as extraordinary as the part on which they agreed.
Mr. Gladstone was greatly grieved because he had found the Prince Consort in a state of indecent hilarity, he thought, over the news about the Immaculate Conception. Indecent hilarity is not a vice conspicuously staining Prince Albert’s name, any more than Gladstone’s; two more solemn disputants would be hard to find. But Prince Albert was the more cheerful, because (he said in effect) it is always a good thing when an evil system tottering to its fall, does some one wildly insane and frantic act of arrogance; which will quite certainly bring it to a final crash. Rome had staggered along somehow till now; but, obviously, Rome would never have a leg to stand on after this.
But Mr. Gladstone (of the Oxford Movement) could not join in this simple German triumph over the disaster and disgrace that had at last destroyed the Eternal City. In those deep tones of reproach he could command so well, he rebuked the Prince for his insensibility to this blasting and blackening of a name that had meant so much in history; no Christian, he felt, could be insensible to the utter downfall of so large a section of the Christian world. He meant it. He was tremendously upset about it. He returned to the subject afterwards; repeatedly imploring Prince Albert to drop at least one tear upon the ruins of St. Peter’s, now lying as desolate as Stonehenge.
But the Prince also was firm; and remained in his somewhat rare state of high spirits over the news that the unduly protracted business was finished; and the Pope had done himself in at last.
And all this was because—of what? Because one more crown had been added to that tower of crowns that crowd after crowd, city after city, nation after nation, age after age, have reared higher and higher on the image which is of all others most strongly based and founded and built, as regards this earth, in the affection of the universal people. And Prince Albert, with his unselfish labours for the education of the working classes, and Gladstone, with his confident appeal to the great heart of the people, understood so little of what that crown and image really meant to millions of ordinary poor people, in all the countrysides and cities of half the world, that they actually expected that it would be dethroned like a tyranny, for this last toppling insolence in the demands of a tyrant.
The one extraordinary thing on which these extraordinary men agreed, it seems, was that the decision would be unpopular. … One of Belloc’s Ballades had a refrain chiefly remembered by the Envoi, which ran:
Prince, is it true that when you met the Czar You said that English people think it low To coax to life a half-extinct cigar? Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!
Anyhow, the one assumption shared by these admirable public men seems to have been wrong somewhere. Apple-women did not rush madly out of church; seamstresses in garrets did not dash their little images of Mary to the ground, on learning that she was named Immaculate.
Four years after these potentates had their regrettable difference, while the Bishop still frowned and the parish priest feared to believe, little knots of poor peasants began to gather round a strange starved child before a crack in the rocks, from whence was to spring a strange stream and almost a new city; the rocks she had heard resound with a voice crying, “I am the Immaculate Conception… .”
“Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!”
LAUGHTER
If we in any sense propose for discussion the subject of Laughter, we shall normally notice that our neighbours receive it in one of two ways. Either they laugh, which is perhaps the best thing they could do with a proposal for the analysis of laughter; since practice is better than precept; and anyone sitting down, as I do here, to write a whole article on this subject is a very proper object for the derision of mankind. But if they have sense enough to laugh, they will also probably have sense enough to go away; the colloquy will be cut short and exhibit only the kind of wit which is identified with brevity.
If, on the other hand, we mention Laughter to them and they do not laugh, what they always do is this; to twist their silly faces into expressions of ferocious gravity and gloom and begin to talk about Primitive Psychology, and the automatic reflexes of Pithecanthropus; and after a month or two of this cheery little chat, they practically always bring out the result (which is an unmistakable sign and a symptom of their dying minds) that “laughter is, after all, founded on some form of the instinct of cruelty”. The whole being a neat and polished exposition of the great modern habit of being as unscientific as possible in the use of scientific words. They have not yet proved that there is any instinct of cruelty, any more than there is an instinct of chewing glass. Some lunatics do chew glass; even some eminent men have done it; I think the famous Sir Richard Grenville had the habit. Some men have a perversion called cruelty; but if primitive men develop a talent for humour from a perversion of cruelty, it is quite as difficult to explain how they developed the perversion as how they developed the talent. We might as well explain the beginning of poetry by saying that Pithecanthropus was addicted to cocaine. The whole thing is one of those impudent insinuations of popular science, quite unsupported by serious science, but having a very strong moral or anti-moral motive; to suggest by innumerable irresponsible hints that human beings owe everything to semi-human beings called primitive men; and that these were utterly degraded creatures, dwelling in a darkness of hatred and fear.
On the face of it, all this theory of laughter is laughable. Anybody can make a child laugh by some simple inversion or incongruity; such as putting spectacles on the teddy bear. Are we asked to believe that a dark troglodyte stirs in the cave of the infant’s skull, and takes pleasure in torturing the teddy bear with unfamiliar optical conditions; or fiendishly rejoices in the agony of an aged uncle when temporarily deprived of his goggles? The sort of literature at which children really laugh is the simplest sort of nonsense like “the cow jumped over the moon”. Are we to suppose children lie awake and laugh to think of the long and chilly journey of the lost quadruped, in the cold altitudes wholly unsuited to warm-blooded mammals? It is obvious that the mind is amused with incongruity, when there is no direct or indirect idea of discomfort. Why it is amused with incongruity is indeed a very deep question, and we shall get no further with such questions until we adopt a totally different attitude to the whole story of man; until we have the patience to respect a great many of the mysteries as mysteries, and wait for an explanation which really explains; instead of jumping at any explanation that merely explains away. But I suspect it will be found connected with the idea of human dignity rather than indignity; and rather related to the strangeness of man on this strange earth, than to the mere dull brutalities connecting him with the dull mud.
It is not surprising that an age exhibiting this monstrous spectacle, of men being sombre and pessimistic about the origin of Laughter, should also exhibit some loss of the simpler sort of laughter in its literature and art. And I fancy even those who might claim that we produce more humour would admit that we produce less laughter. But the poison of the anti-human heresy I have mentioned works back in a curious fashion into the practice of those who have heard the theory; and the ideas of cause and effect act and react on each other. It may be that only in a dry age could pedants be found to trace back all mirth to malignity; it may be that the atmospheric suggestion of that origin has made the mirth less mirthful, and more dry if not more malignant. But certainly, at the best, the tendency of recent culture has been to tolerate the smile but discourage the laugh. There are three differences involved here. First, that the smile can unobtrusively turn into the sneer; second, that the smile is always individual and even secretive (especially if it is a little mad), while the laugh can be social and gregarious, and is perhaps the one genuine surviving form of the General Will; and third, that laughing lays itself open to criticism, is innocent and unguarded, has the sort of humanity which has always something of humility. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticising the men who laugh. We may read in any current novel, “Grigsby stroked his chin and smiled a rather superior smile.” We seldom read, even in a novel, “Grigsby flung back his head and howled at the ceiling with a slightly superior laugh.” The moment Grigsby abandons himself so far as to laugh he has lost something of that perfect superiority of the Grigsbys, for which they are famous in fashionable circles, and for which so many of their fellow-creatures would love to kick them, as old Weller kicked Mr. Stiggins. For it is a complete mistake to suppose that there is less cruelty since we abandoned the good old custom of kicking Mr. Stiggins. The only difference is that it is Mr. Grigsby who is allowed to be cruel; because of the lack of simpler and humbler men to enjoy the innocent pleasure of kicking him. In the mind of Mr. Grigsby, at that exquisite moment when he smiles, there is infinitely more cruelty, in the sense of mere malice, than there was in the mind of Weller when he applied the boot, or Dickens when he wrote the book. The chief mark of the most modern change in the world is that milder social manners do not go with warmer social feelings. The chief fact we have to face today is the absence of even that amount of democratic comradeship which was involved in coarse laughter or merely conventional ridicule. The men of the older fellowship may have sometimes unjustly disliked a scapegoat or an alien, but they liked each other much more than a good many literary men now like each other. It is obvious in a thousand ways that there was more communal sentiment, or if you will sentimentality, in the camps where Bret Harte’s ruffians brandished bowie-knives and revolvers, or in the public-house cellar where Mr. Bardell was knocked on the head with a quart pot, than in many a modern intellectual circle in which the soul is at last finally isolated, like the heads in hell held apart in their rings of ice. Therefore, in this modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favour of laughing. Laughter has something in it in common with the ancient winds of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes men forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves; something (as the common phrase goes about a joke) that they cannot resist. The saint is he who enjoys good things and refuses them. The prig is he who despises good things and enjoys them. But when he hears a really good thing, which he really enjoys, then he can no longer despise it. On that awful and apocalyptic occasion, he does not smile; he laughs.
TALES FROM TOLSTOI
In one sense there is a real and actual law of progress by which we grow simpler as we grow more civilised, for the more we scan and study the phenomena around us the more they tend to unify themselves with the power behind them, and the whole of existence thus seen for the first time seems something of an entirely new shape and colour, a fresh and surprising thing. And all the great writers of our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish communication with the elemental or, as it is sometimes more roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the return to nature consists in drinking no wine ; some think that it consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into very ineffectual British War Office bayonets.
It is natural, according to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionists, to kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoi by seeing how much he can reject.
Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature, especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy tale who should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would find his tail growing like a tree in the meadow at the end of the world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search of nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity, much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think that she is heeding us least. “Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,” said the Hebrew poets. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a man’s back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoi. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.
King Solomon brought merchant men Because of his desire With peacocks, apes and ivory, From Tarshish unto Tyre.
But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a part of his folly—I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoi, we feel, would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at “Solomon in all his glory”. With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.
Any collection of Tales from Tolstoi is calculated to draw particular attention to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoi’s work. In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the work of Tolstoi is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is that an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoi comes out constantly in his stories, the great moral which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all the tales, the folklore simplicity with which “a man or a woman” are spoken of without further identification, the love—one might almost say the lust— for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man— these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoi, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoi has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one’s corner of a great and good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoi the great artist with Tolstoi the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.
THE NEW CASE FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
Any amount of nonsense has been talked about the need of novelty, and in that sense there is nothing particularly meritorious about being modern. A man who seriously describes his creed as Modernism might just as well invent a creed called Mondayism, meaning that he puts special faith in the fancies that occurred to him on Monday; or a creed called Morningism, meaning that he believed in the thoughts that occurred to him in the morning but not in the afternoon.
Modernity is only the moment of time in which we happen to find ourselves, and nobody who thinks will suppose that it is bound to be superior, either to the time that comes after it or to the time that went before. But in a relative and rational sense we may congratulate ourselves on knowing the news of the moment, and having realised recent facts or discoveries that some people still ignore.
And it is in that sense that we may truly call the fundamental concept of Catholic Education a scientific fact, and especially a psychological fact. Our demand for a complete culture, based on its own philosophy and religion, is a demand that is really unanswerable, in the light of the most vital and even the most modern psychology. For that matter, for those who care for such things, there could hardly be a word more modern than atmosphere.
Now, so long as they are engaged in doing anything whatever except arguing with us, our modern and scientific friends are never tired of telling us that education must be treated as a whole; that all parts of the mind affect each other; that nothing is too trivial to be significant and even symbolic; that all thoughts can be coloured by conscious or unconscious emotions; that knowledge can never be in watertight compartments; that what may seem a senseless detail may be the symbol of a deep desire; that nothing is negative, nothing is naked, nothing stands separate and alone.
They use these arguments for all sorts of purposes, some of them sensible enough, some of them almost insanely silly; but this is, broadly speaking, how they argue. And the one thing they do not know is that they are arguing in favour of Catholic education, and especially in favour of Catholic atmosphere in Catholic schools. Perhaps if they did know they would leave off.
As a matter of fact, those who refuse to understand that Catholic children must have an entirely Catholic school are back in the bad old days, as they would express it, when nobody wanted education but only instruction. They are relics of the dead time when it was thought enough to drill pupils in two or three dull and detached lessons that were supposed to be quite mechanical. They descend from the original Philistine who first talked about “The Three R.s”; and the joke about him is very symbolic of his type or time. For he was the sort of man who insists very literally on literacy, and, even in doing so, shows himself illiterate.
They were very uneducated rich men who loudly demanded education. And among the marks of their ignorance and stupidity was the particular mark that they regarded letters and figures as dead things, quite separate from each other and from a general view of life. They thought of a boy learning his letters as something quite cut off, for instance, from what is meant by a man of letters. They thought a calculating boy could be made like a calculating machine.
When somebody said to them, therefore, “These things must be taught in a spiritual atmosphere”, they thought it was nonsense; they had a vague idea that it meant that a child could only do a simple addition sum when surrounded with the smell of incense. But they thought simple addition much more simple than it is. When the Catholic controversialist said to them, “Even the alphabet can be learnt in a Catholic way”, they thought he was a raving bigot, they thought he meant that nobody must ever read anything but a Latin missal.
But he meant what he said, and what he said is thoroughly sound psychology. There is a Catholic view of learning the alphabet; for instance, it prevents you from thinking that the only thing that matters is learning the alphabet; or from despising better people than yourself, if they do not happen to have learnt the alphabet.
The old unpsychological school of instructors used to say: “What possible sense can there be in mixing up arithmetic with religion?” But arithmetic is mixed up with religion, or at the worst with philosophy. It does make a great deal of difference whether the instructor implies that truth is real, or relative, or changeable, or an illusion. The man who said, “Two and two may make five in the fixed stars”, was teaching arithmetic in an anti-rational way, and, therefore, in an anti-Catholic way. The Catholic is much more certain about the fixed truths than about the fixed stars.
But I am not now arguing which philosophy is the better; I am only pointing out that every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all. And the modern educationists, the modern psychologists, the modern men of science, all agree in asserting and reasserting this—until they begin to quarrel with Catholics over Catholic schools.
In short, if there is a psychological truth discoverable by human reason, it is this; that Catholics must either go without Catholic teaching or possess and govern Catholic schools. There is a case for refusing to allow Catholic families to grow up Catholic, by any machinery worth calling education in the existing sense. There is a case for refusing to make any concessions to Catholics at all, and ignoring their idiosyncrasy as if it were an insanity. There is a case for that, because there is and always has been a case for persecution; for the State acting on the principle that certain philosophies are false and dangerous and must be crushed even if they are sincerely held; indeed that they must be crushed, especially if they are sincerely held.
But if Catholics are to teach Catholicism all the time, they cannot merely teach Catholic theology for part of the time. It is our opponents, and not we, who give a really outrageous and superstitious position to dogmatic theology. It is they who suppose that the special “subject” called theology can be put into people by an experiment lasting half an hour; and that this magical inoculation will last them through a week in a world that is soaked through and through with a contrary conception of life.
Theology is only articulate religion; but, strange as it seems to the true Christians who criticise us, it is necessary to have religion as well as theology. And religion, as they are often obliging enough to remind us when this particular problem is not involved, is a thing for every day of the week and not merely for Sunday or Church services.
The truth is that the modern world has committed itself to two totally different and inconsistent conceptions about education. It is always trying to expand the scope of education; and always trying to exclude from it all religion and philosophy. But this is sheer nonsense. You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education. But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true.
Since the coming of the more ambitious psychological education, our schools have claimed to develop all sides of human nature; that is, to produce a complete human being. You cannot do this and totally ignore a great living tradition, which teaches that a complete human being must be a Christian or Catholic human being. You must either persecute it out of existence or allow it to make its own education complete.
When schooling was supposed to consist of spelling, of counting and making pothooks and hangers, you might make out some kind of case for saying that it could be taught indifferently by a Baptist or Buddhist. But what in the world is the sense of having an education which includes lessons in “citizenship”, for instance; and then pretending not to include anything like a moral theory, and ignoring all those who happen to hold that a moral theory depends on a moral theology.
Our schoolmasters profess to bring out every side of the pupil; the aesthetic side; the athletic side; the political side, and so on; and yet they still talk the stale cant of the nineteenth century about public instruction having nothing to do with the religious side. The truth is that, in this matter, it is our enemies who are stick-in-the mud, and still remain in the stuffy atmosphere of undeveloped and unscientific education; while we are, in this at any rate, on the side of all modern psychologists and serious educationists in recognising the idea of atmosphere. They sometimes like to call it environment.
VULGARITY
Vulgarity is one of the great new modern inventions; like the telephone or the wireless set. It may be plausibly maintained that the telephone is less of an instrument of torture than the thumbscrew or the rack, and in the same way that other ages had other vices that were worse than this new or modern vice. As we may find fanciful sketches of aeroplanes in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, or speculations very near to modern physics in the philosophers of ancient Greece, so we may find here and there in history a hint or foreshadowing of the great and golden vision of vulgarity that was later to burst on the world. We may find it in the smell of Punic plutocracy that stank in the nostrils of Greeks and Romans, or in a certain touch of bad taste in an aesthete like Nero.
Nevertheless, the thing is so new that the new world has not yet really found a name for it, but has had to borrow a rather misleading name, which is really the Latin word for something else. So we have to go on using the Greek name of amber as the only name of electricity because we have no notion what is the real name or nature of electricity. And so we have to go on using the Latin word vulgus, which only meant the common people, to describe something that is not particularly common among the common people.
Indeed, through long stretches of human history, and over wide spaces of the habitable globe, it is very uncommon among the common people. Farmers living by long agricultural traditions, peasants in normal villages, even savages in savage tribes, are hardly ever vulgar. Even when they massacre and enslave, even when they offer human sacrifice or eat human flesh, they are hardly ever vulgar. All travellers attest to the natural dignity of their carriage and the ceremonial gravity of their customs. Even in the more complex modern cities and civilisations the poor as such are not particularly vulgar.
No; there is a new thing, which really needs a new name, and still more, a new definition. I do not say I can define vulgarity; but, having just been reading a modern book about love, I feel inclined to throw out a few suggestions.
In so far as I can get near to its essence, it consists largely of two elements, which I should describe as facility and familiarity. The first means that a man does really, as the phrase goes, “gush”; that is, his self-expression flows without effort, selection or control. It does not come from him like picked and pointed words, passing through an articulate organ; it simply streams from him like perspiration. He need never stop explaining himself, for he understands neither himself nor the limits of explanation. He is the sort of man who understands women; he is the man who can always get on with the boys; he finds it easy to talk, easy to write, easy to speak in public, for his own self-satisfaction carries with it a sort of huge cloud and illusion of applause.
And the second element is familiarity, which, if understood, would be called profanity. Horace spoke of the “profane vulgar”, and it is true that this familiarity is the loss of holy fear and a sin against the mystical side of man. In practice it means handling things confidently and contemptuously, without the sense that all things in their way are sacred things. Its most recent mode is the readiness to write torrents of tosh on either side of any serious subject, for you hardly ever get real vulgarity on a frivolous subject.
The point is that the fool is so subjective that it never occurs to him to be afraid of the subject. For instance, he can be a Pagan fool, as well as a Puritan fool, in the debate on modern morals; but in the first case there will be torrents of tosh about love and passion and the right to live and in the other, exactly similar torrents of tosh about Christian manhood and healthy boyhood and noble motherhood and the rest. The trouble is that they are so infernally familiar with these things.
Never do you find that note in a real lover writing of the woman he loves or in a real saint writing of the sin he hates. Both say the right thing, because they would rather say nothing at all.
THE REVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY—WHY?
The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy. Such broken bits are the phrases I have quoted: efficiency and evolution and the rest. The idea of being “practical”, standing all by itself, is all that remains of a Pragmatism that cannot stand at all. It is impossible to be practical without a Pragma. And what would happen if you went up to the next practical man you met and said to the poor dear old duffer, “Where is your Pragma?” Doing the work that is nearest is obvious nonsense; yet it has been repeated in many albums. In nine cases out of ten it would mean doing the work that we are least fitted to do, such as cleaning the windows or clouting the policeman over the head. “Deeds, not words” is itself an excellent example of “Words, not thoughts”. It is a deed to throw a pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows. But there are certainly very futile words; and this sort of journalistic philosophy and popular science almost entirely consists of them.
Some people fear that philosophy will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long words, but a tangle of complicated notions. These people miss the whole point of the modern situation. These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly for want of a philosophy. The politicians and the papers are always using long words. It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong. The political and social relations are already hopelessly complicated. They are far more complicated than any page of medieval metaphysics; the only difference is that the medievalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and the moderns cannot. The chief practical things of today, like finance and political corruption, are frightfully complicated. We are content to tolerate them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them. The business world needs metaphysics—to simplify it.
I know these words will be received with scorn, and with gruff reassertion that this is no time for nonsense and paradox; and that what is really wanted is a practical man to go in and clear up the mess. And a practical man will doubtless appear, one of the unending succession of practical men; and he will doubtless go in, and perhaps clear up a few millions for himself and leave the mess more bewildering than before; as each of the other practical men has done. The reason is perfectly simple. This sort of rather crude and unconscious person always adds to the confusion; because he himself has two or three different motives at the same moment, and does not distinguish between them. A man has, already entangled hopelessly in his own mind, (1) a hearty and human desire for money, (2) a somewhat priggish and superficial desire to be progressing, or going the way the world is going, (3) a dislike to being thought too old to keep up with the young people, (4) a certain amount of vague but genuine patriotism or public spirit, (5) a misunderstanding of a mistake made by Mr. H. G. Wells, in the form of a book on Evolution. When a man has all these things in his head, and does not even attempt to sort them out, he is called by common consent and acclamation a practical man. But the practical man cannot be expected to improve the impracticable muddle; for he cannot clear up the muddle in his own mind, let alone in his own highly complex community and civilisation. For some strange reason, it is the custom to say of this sort of practical man that “he knows his own mind”. Of course this is exactly what he does not know. He may in a few fortunate cases know what he wants, as does a dog or a baby of two years old; but even then he does not know why he wants it. And it is the why and the how that have to be considered when we are tracing out the way in which some culture or tradition has got into a tangle. What we need, as the ancients understood, is not a politician who is a business man, but a king who is a philosopher.
I apologise for the word “king”, which is not strictly necessary to the sense; but I suggest that it would be one of the functions of the philosopher to pause upon such words, and determine their importance and unimportance. The Roman Republic and all its citizens had to the last a horror of the word “king”. It was in consequence of this that they invented and imposed on us the word “Emperor”. The great Republicans who founded America also had a horror of the word “king”; which has therefore reappeared with the special qualification of a Steel King, an Oil King, a Pork King, or other similar monarchs made of similar materials. The business of the philosopher is not necessarily to condemn the innovation or to deny the distinction. But it is his duty to ask himself exactly what it is that he or others dislike in the word “king”. If what he dislikes is a man wearing the spotted fur of a small animal called the ermine, or a man having once had a metal ring placed on the top of his head by a clergyman, he will decide one way. If what he dislikes is a man having vast or irresponsible powers over other men, he may decide another. If what he dislikes is such fur or such power being handed on from father to son, he will enquire whether this ever occurs under commercial conditions today. But, anyhow, he will have the habit of testing the thing by the thought; by the idea which he likes or dislikes; and not merely by the sound of a syllable or the look of four letters beginning with an “R”.
Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today. But man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.
I will take one example out of a thousand that might be taken. What is the attitude of an ordinary man on being told of an extraordinary event: a miracle? I mean the sort of thing that is loosely called supernatural, but should more properly be called preternatural. For the word supernatural applies only to what is higher than man; and a good many modern miracles look as if they came from what is considerably lower. Anyhow, what do modern men say when apparently confronted with something that cannot, in the cant phrase, be naturally explained? Well, most modern men immediately talk nonsense. When such a thing is currently mentioned, in novels or newspapers or magazine stories, the first comment is always something like, “But my dear fellow, this is the twentieth century!” It is worth having a little training in philosophy if only to avoid looking so ghastly a fool as that. It has on the whole rather less sense or meaning than saying, “But my dear fellow, this is Tuesday afternoon.” If miracles cannot happen, they cannot happen in the twentieth century or in the twelfth. If they can happen, nobody can prove that there is a time when they cannot happen. The best that can be said for the sceptic is that he cannot say what he means, and therefore, whatever else he means, he cannot mean what he says. But if he only means that miracles can be believed in the twelfth century, but cannot be believed in the twentieth, then he is wrong again, both in theory and in fact. He is wrong in theory, because an intelligent recognition of possibilities does not depend on a date but on a philosophy. An atheist could disbelieve in the first century and a mystic could continue to believe in the twenty-first century. And he is wrong, in fact, because there is every sign of there being a great deal of mysticism and miracle in the twenty-first century; and there is quite certainly an increasing mass of it in the twentieth.
But I have only taken that first superficial repartee because there is a significance in the mere fact that it comes first; and its very superficiality reveals something of the subconsciousness. It is almost an automatic repartee; and automatic words are of some importance in psychology. Let us not be too severe on the worthy gentleman who informs his dear fellow that it is the twentieth century. In the mysterious depths of his being even that enormous ass does actually mean something. The point is that he cannot really explain what he means; and that is the argument for a better education in philosophy. What he really means is something like this, “There is a theory of this mysterious universe to which more and more people were in fact inclined during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries; and up to that point at least, this theory did grow with the growing inventions and discoveries of science to which we owe our present social organisation— or disorganisation. That theory maintains that cause and effect have from the first operated in an uninterrupted sequence like a fixed fate; and that there is no will behind or within that fate; so that it must work itself out in the absence of such a will, as a machine must run down in the absence of a man. There were more people in the nineteenth century than in the ninth who happened to hold this particular theory of the universe. I myself happened to hold it; and therefore I obviously cannot believe in miracles.” That is perfectly good sense; but so is the counter-statement; “I do not happen to hold it; and therefore I obviously can believe in miracles.”
The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, “Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process.” The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish. He will then go off and say: “One can’t have such things in the twentieth century”; which really is gibberish. Yet the former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms. If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he dies. But he is not justified in saying that it cannot run uphill, until he really knows why it runs downhill. To say it does so by gravitation answers the physical but not the philosophical question. It only repeats that there is a repetition; it does not touch the deeper question of whether that repetition could be altered by anything outside it. And that depends on whether there is anything outside it. For instance, suppose that a man had only seen the river in a dream. He might have seen it in a hundred dreams, always repeating itself and always running downhill. But that would not prevent the hundredth dream being different and the river climbing the mountain; because the dream is a dream, and there is something outside it. Mere repetition does not prove reality or inevitability. We must know the nature of the thing and the cause of the repetition. If the nature of the thing is a Creation, and the cause of the thing a Creator, in other words if the repetition itself is only the repetition of something willed by a person, then it is not impossible for the same person to will a different thing. If a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing in a miracle; but not otherwise. Otherwise, he is simply a philosopher who is consistent in his philosophy.
A modern man is quite free to choose either philosophy. But what is actually the matter with the modern man is that he does not know even his own philosophy; but only his own phraseology. He can only answer the next spiritual message produced by a spiritualist, or the next cure attested by doctors at Lourdes, by repeating what are generally nothing but phrases; or are, at their best, prejudices.
Thus, when so brilliant a man as Mr. H. G. Wells says that such supernatural ideas have become impossible “for intelligent people”, he is (for that instant) not talking like an intelligent person. In other words, he is not talking like a philosopher; because he is not even saying what he means. What he means is, not “impossible for intelligent men”, but, “impossible for intelligent monists”, or, “impossible for intelligent determinists”. But it is not a negation of intelligence to hold any coherent and logical conception of so mysterious a world. It is not a negation of intelligence to think that all experience is a dream. It is not unintelligent to think it a delusion, as some Buddhists do; let alone to think it a product of creative will, as Christians do. We are always being told that men must no longer be so sharply divided into their different religions. As an immediate step in progress, it is much more urgent that they should be more clearly and more sharply divided into their different philosophies.
VANDALISM
Vandalism is of two kinds, the negative and the positive; as in the Vandals of the ancient world, who destroyed buildings, and the Vandals of the modern world, who erect them. A long procession of those typically modern thinkers, who are too tired to think, has already left behind a trail or tradition of language; by which it is vaguely suggested that whatever is constructive is good and only what is destructive is bad. Anyone wishing to lose himself in mazes of such logic, or rather illogicality, may put to himself some particular proposition; as that it is good to construct a stake, with faggots, for burning a man alive, and yet bad to destroy a growing plantation or cut down trees, which is the only possible way of doing it. But in the particular case of Vandalism, it is very specially necessary to remember that the real argument is all the other way. Of two bad things, it is better to be the barbarian who destroys something, which for some reason he dislikes or does not understand, and who may yet sincerely like other things that he does understand, rather than to be the vulgarian who erects something exactly expressive of what he likes; and in that act rears a colossal image of the smallness of his soul. Destructive Vandalism, though a very great evil at the present time, and indeed through all history, has not been in all history so bad as it is now; and certainly not so bad as many more constructive things that exist now.
It is important to remember that there are two kinds of mere destructiveness; neither on the noblest level of human culture, but neither on the most ignoble. First, of course, the Vandal may be the Iconoclast. He may destroy certain artistic creations because they are really opposed to his moral convictions. Thus a Puritan fanatic from America might conceivably think himself commanded by the Lord to dynamite Westminster Abbey, because it is full of idols; that is of images with a religious character. Curiously enough, he would be half right. It is full of idols; but they are not images of a religious character. Anybody can see at a glance that medieval figures of saints and angels are not worshipped; for the perfectly simple reason that they are themselves represented in the act of worshipping. But the eighteenth-century statues of statesmen and generals really are idols. They are manifestly set up, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of the men there represented; who are to be directly worshipped for their own sake; as the Pagans worshipped demigods and heroes. Lord Polkerton and Admiral Bangs are not themselves represented in the act of worshipping; but in the act of being worshipped. For the eighteenth century, which has been called the Age of Reason, was the real Age of Idolatry. This, however, is a parenthesis. The point is that the American fanatic would be a much finer fellow than the American chain-store man who finds half London in the chains of his cheap and tawdry stores. If the dynamite of the Iconoclast caved in the whole front of Westminster Abbey, I should be far less horrified than I am at a project of a Yankee shopkeeper for building a tower with bells, taller than Westminster Cathedral. It is curious to reflect on the few stray nerves of criticism and sensibility that still remain. I fancy that if an American erected immediately opposite Windsor Castle, on the other side of the river, another castle of exactly the same castellated form and plan, only a little bigger (being made of cheap and rotten material) and then flew the flag of his own ancient family in direct defiance of the personal flag of the King, there would be a good many people in society who would tell the American, however rich he was, that this was going a bit too far. Which shows how much safer it is to insult religion than to insult royalty.
Secondly, in the great moral philosophy of being fair to Vandals, we must remember that there is a certain element in life which has even a right to its place in life, though that place may not always be easy to find, without displacing better things. We talk of positive and negative, of creation and destruction; but in a sense the association is incorrect. Destruction is not negation; at least it is not always and of necessity negation. There is a positive pleasure in destruction, which can be harmless and is certainly real. It is innocent, for it is felt strongly by children when they first tear up paper or break sticks. But I trust that few of us have so entirely lost our innocence, as to be unable to drink deep joy from smashing up the happy home. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he has never, when standing in a respectable parlour, felt a wild desire to seize a pot and plant and send it crashing through the bow windows into the front-garden or the street? These things are not entirely to be sterilised; these things also are from God. It is all explained in a ballade which my friends and I composed years ago, after I had shattered a great tumbler all over the carpet. It has the refrain: “I like the noise of breaking glass.” And though I should not like the glass of Chartres Cathedral to be broken merely to gratify this taste, I can imagine two types of human beings who might break it and remain human. A lunatic might do it because he thought it unChristian to make pictures of the life of Christ; and a boy might do it because he liked the noise of breaking glass. So much for the defence of the more dignified Vandal—the Destroyer.
But the new sort of Vandal is much more indefensible. The crude creative Vandal is much more of a pestilence and a peril. There is more to be said for the conqueror, who makes a solitude and calls it peace, than for the other who makes a pandemonium and calls it progress. For he brands upon the eye in memory the positive and vivid picture of his own meanness and stupidity. The barbarians who laid waste the world may have prevailed in so far that some good things were forgotten, but they did not insist that their own base and barbarous things should be remembered. But that is exactly what the “constructive” vulgarian does. That is exactly what the Modern Vandal does. It is a gloomy pleasure to think that if a dissolving civilisation brings in forces more like those of the Ancient Vandals, if vagabond tribes from Asia or Eastern Europe drift in with the old-world, animal, almost automatic destructiveness of the Huns or the Bashi-Bazouks, they at least will wreck and ruin all the new Civilisation without any pretence of reconstructing it; and that towering and glaring flats, or long leagues of flashy glass shop-windows, will lie in rubbish-heaps side by side with better things.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is more remarkable about Mrs. Browning’s work than the absence of that trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad, it is bad from some extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, she is far more a great poet than she is a good one.
Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite abandoning the world. Such a couplet as—
Our Euripides, the human, With his dropping of warm tears.
gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with a loud splash, and Mrs. Browning coming after him with a thermometer. But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs. Hemans would never have written it. She would have written something perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs. Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it. She had that catastrophic and public failure which is as much as a medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.
In spite of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Any one who has tried to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve, as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense. Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare, that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit:
And the eyes of the peacock fans Winked at the alien glory,
she said of the Papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolour.
And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble. And the shadow of a monarch’s crown is softened in her hair,
is her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of peacock feathers winking like so many London urchins is perhaps one of her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a woman’s hair as the softened shadow of a crown is a singularly vivid and perfect one. But both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs. Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic, irrevocable, and big with coming events, so every one of her wild weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a certain effect on the imagination, which has for good or evil become part and parcel of our mental vision for ever. She gives the reader the impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentlemen of the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell it was always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the leap.
“Casa Guidi Windows” is, in one aspect, a poem very typical of its author. Mrs. Browning may fairly be called the peculiar poet of Liberalism, of that great movement of the first half of the nineteenth century towards the emancipation of men from ancient institutions which had gradually changed their nature, from the houses of refuge which had turned into dungeons, and the mystic jewels which remained only as letters. It was not what we ordinarily understand by revolt. It had no hatred in its heart for ancient and essentially human institutions. It had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy. Their ideal, like the ideal of all sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April, and regiments being cut to pieces for a flag. They were neither Radicals nor Socialists, but Liberals, and a liberal is a noble and indispensable lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.
Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals. Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious revolutions. He could follow the medieval logicians in all their sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true revolutionist; for all true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an idiot. For how could a man even wish for something which he had never heard of? Mrs. Browning’s inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason, which it is difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction exist. Men whose lives are mainly based upon friendship sympathise with the friendships of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other is a proverb, and like many other proverbs sometimes a nuisance. In patriotism alone it is considered correct just now to assume that the sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great Liberals of Mrs. Browning’s time. The Brownings had, so to speak, a disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England and they loved Italy; yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitans. They loved the two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe. They had hold of the root and essence of patriotism. They knew how certain flowers and birds and rivers pass into the mills of the brain and come out as wars and discoveries, and how some triumphant adventure or some staggering crime wrought in a remote continent may bear about it the colour of an Italian city or the soul of a silent village of Surrey.
THE ERASTIAN ON THE ESTABLISHMENT
Dean Inge is so obviously the most acute, the most cultivated and the most individual of the sceptical school which he represents, that there is sometimes inevitably an appearance of singling him out, when the singularity is only due to his own distinction. It is due, if we must put it more roughly, to there being so very few intellectuals of that school who are worth answering. I have often myself, perhaps, put it more roughly than I intended; but the double duty involved presents a problem not easily solved. The trouble is that he is really in such a false position that the true statement of it sounds itself like a taunt. Yet it may not be meant for a taunt, but only for a truth. His own position certainly does not seem as false to him as it does to us; but to excuse it requires a long explanation which is impossible in so short an expression. For instance, he wrote the other day a severe condemnation of those of the Anglican clergy who favour the Disestablishment of the Church of England. It may seem curt to retort, as I should be first inclined to do, that the Dean naturally hesitates to sever the one very slender strip of red tape that still connects him with Christianity. Yet it is quite true; and it is not necessarily merely hostile.
To understand the curious case of Dean Inge, in a spirit of Christian charity, we must leave for the moment all questions of creed and definition and call up another image before the mind. It is the image that was in the mind of Matthew Arnold when he openly said that, being almost an agnostic himself, he yet wished to preserve the institutions of religion, and especially the literature of religion; that he found these best preserved in the Church of England and advised nobody to leave it. We must call up the image of a historic hierarchy of priests who are also professors, and whose main business is scholarship and the study of letters; it was not for nothing that both Arnold and Inge had connections with Oxford. Most of such men would probably be Christian in hereditary sentiment and subject-matter; but their Christianity would not, so to speak, be the point. We can even imagine the institution better if we think of it as a Confucian rather than a Christian foundation. The idea of it is a classical culture that is undisturbed. But it has this further essential point; that if its traditions and rites must be undisturbed, so also must its doubts and negations be undisturbed. It must be so traditional that a sceptic is safe there.
Something like this may really have existed in Chinese and other pagan parallels. Something like it probably did exist among the last pagan priests of antiquity. A jolly old heathen Flamen or Pontifex Maximus did not want to be disturbed in explaining away the gods to his friends; and certainly did not want to make himself responsible for drawing the exact line between truth and fable in the metamorphoses of Ovid or the genealogies of Jupiter. And something of the same sort did exist in the Academic Anglicanism of the Erastian age in England, when scholarly Whigs and rather worldly bishops quoted indifferently Horace and Augustine and Gibbon over the nuts and wine. That is the Establishment which Dean Inge really likes to see established; that is the civilised institution which he does really and sincerely believe to be a good thing; a traditional home of learning and liberal education, though mainly for the few; a thing that to the outer world shall be as authoritative as the medieval abbots, but in its inner life be as casual as the Greek philosophers; a thing that need not exclude the heretical, but does exclude the ignorant; a thing that can admit all questions so long as it is never questioned itself.
Now a cultural tradition of that kind can have many marks of dignity and national value; and a man may without absurdity or falsity wish to preserve it as a national thing. But there are a number of conditions to be remembered, which Dean Inge now seems continually to forget. For one thing, the nation must continue in the same mood of respect towards the college of professors, or whatever it is to be called. The modern mood is changing very rapidly; and I think it would be an exaggeration to say that all England is now filled with an affection and veneration for Dons. Another difficulty is that whatever this sort of Chinese synod can do, it cannot exist side by side with a real and passionate religion. It was defeated by the Christians at the end of the Roman era. It was defeated even by the Methodists at the end of the eighteenth century. It is often quoted of poor Charles II that he said that Puritanism was no religion for a gentleman. It is not so often added that he also said that Anglicanism was no religion for a Christian.
This, I fancy, is what the Dean really means; and it explains why be is at once such a conservative and such an iconoclast; such a sceptic and such a Tory. It is not, of course, in so many words what he says. When driven to defend his bunch of bigwigs, with their libraries and endowments, he characteristically takes an old book out of those dusty shelves, and quotes from Burke the thesis that the Church was only the State seen in one light and the State was only the Church seen in another light. Burke always struck me as, of all men, the man with the most imaginative and the most utterly unreal mind. Even as he uttered such a phrase, he must have known that the Church was packed with people who did not believe in it, and that the leaders of the State had almost ceased to pretend to do so. All the time, it is worth remarking, Burke was gravely discussing the admission to the Church of Dissenters whose whole enthusiasm was admittedly concerned with making their Calvinist God if possible more of a devil than he was before. He knew the world around him was crowded with such fanatics and with such blasphemers; and yet he could bring himself to imagine that the actual secular condition of all England was the Church of Christ, if one only slightly shifted one’s point of view. But it was rather odd to maintain this even in Burke’s time; it is perfectly crazy to maintain it in our time. Dean Inge admits, that two great calamities might really ruin his plan, and make the position of the Church of England impossible. But he thinks that neither is likely enough to be worth considering. One is—what would happen if a large body of England really abandoned Christianity? The other is what would happen if England went over to Rome? The answer to both these impossibilities is very simple. It is that the second might happen any day, and the first has happened already.
Of course it is possible to play an endless game with the word “Christian” and perpetually extend its epoch by perpetually diminishing its meaning. By the time that everybody has agreed that being a Christian only means thinking that Christ was a good man, it will indeed be true that few persons outside lunatic asylums can be denied the name of Christian. But it is really a mere alteration in the meaning of a word that prevents us saying frankly that a great mass, probably a majority, of our modern people are Pagans. Many of them make a mock of standards of family piety or public dignity that were generally accepted by the Pagans. But most of them, if they have any religion at all, have a religion of pantheism or pure ethics which most of the great Christian characters of history, Catholic or Protestant would have instantly stamped as pagan. If you had asked Wesley, or Swedenborg, or Dr. Johnson, or Baxter, or Luther, they would have called the modern mood heathen more promptly, if possible, than would Bossuet or Bellarmine. If it is true that the Church is simply the religion of the State, we have got precious near to saying that it is simply the irreligion of the State.
There was a bitter and cynical man (also, I am sure, an Oxford man) who said, “The Church of England is our last bulwark against Christianity”. This is quite unjust as a description of the Church of England. But it is not altogether unjust as a description of Dean Inge. What is really at the back of his mind is this image of a great academic and cultural tradition, established as a national need but not specially as a spiritual need. It is to have religious texts—to criticise; religious ceremonial— to reform slightly and rather pompously from time to time; a sort of assumption on religion, in the sense that it could not tolerate the horrors of anything like the Russian denial of religion. But all through, it will be subject to one unmistakable test. It can coexist with Doubt; but it cannot coexist with Faith.
At the end of his article, Dean Inge tries to toss aside as impertinent the term Erastianism; the term is too obviously true not to irritate. But in any case he absurdly underrates its meaning at the moment. It is not a question of whether those who form a nation by being Englishmen could in the abstract form a religion by being Anglicans. It is a question of whether a Church which does at least exist, with some who belong to it and some who do not belong to it, should be ruled by those who do not belong to it. Erastianism exists today in the perfectly practical sense that any Jew, Holy Roller or Hyde Park atheist may dictate what that Christian Church shall do on any matter whatever, however intimate and sacred. Bradlaugh was a Member of Parliament; he might well have become a Cabinet Minister and appointed Bishops. Mr. Saklatvala was a Socialist leader and might quite well be a Labour Minister, with a majority in the House and might by Act of Parliament make the Prayer Book anything he chose. That is State Establishment, as now universally understood; that is what Dean Inge desires and presumably defends; or must set about the delicate task of defending.
THE END OF THE MODERNS
All schools of thought, moderate or revolutionary or reactionary, are agreed that the future is full of new possibilities or perils, that the various forms of revolt in art or thought are the beginning of big changes, and especially that certain geniuses, creative or destructive, have opened the gates of a new world. The Communist may think they are the gates of heaven, or the Conservative that they are the gates of hell. But both substantially agree that they mark not only the end of the world, but the beginning of another world. The modern writers who have been hailed alternatively as dynamic or demoniac are, for good or evil, but the forerunners of others yet more dynamic or more demoniac. Both sides are heartily agreed about this; and I have the misfortune to disagree with both of them.
I think the first fact about what may roughly be called Futurism is that it has no future. It has still a very lively and interesting present. Indeed, it has already a picturesque and romantic past. The life of D. H. Lawrence, for instance, has already become a mere legend, which might be of any antiquity; and the romantic and rather sentimental glamour that has already gathered about him is now quite as distant and diffused as that which gathered round Byron or Burns. As for the present, no period could be entirely dull when Mr. Aldous Huxley was writing in it; but it is significant to notice what he writes. In Brave New World he shows that however grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.
I take these two names as typical of what has been called in the last decade modernity or revolt; but the thesis I would seriously suggest covers something larger and perhaps simpler. The revolutionary elements in our epoch do not mark the beginning, but the end, of an epoch of revolution. I should hesitate to describe a number of distinguished and often honest literary gentlemen as Dregs; or I would have given that short and convenient title to this article. I prefer to put the same meaning, or even the same metaphor, into the words of a revolutionary poet (whose present unpopularity is enough to show how insecure is the future of revolutionary poetry) and while I drink to the memory of Lawrence or the health of Huxley, murmur the words:
All thine the last wine that I pour is The last in the chalice I drain.
That will suggest the same idea in less offensive language. In short, it is doubtless true, in the words of Mr. Jefferson Brick (that pioneer of revolt), that the Libation of Freedom must sometimes be quaffed in Blood; but whether it be in blood or wine, that cup is very nearly dry.
My reason for thinking this has nothing to do with likes or dislikes or the wish being father to the thought; it is the sort of logic that is more like mathematics or chess. To almost all the modern moral and metaphysical systems, as stated by the moderns themselves, I should be content to add the comment, “Mate in three moves.” That is, these thinkers have landed themselves in positions which are already doomed by the laws of thought; or, to change the mathematical to the military figure, their positions are outflanked, their communications cut and their ammunition very obviously running short. In many cases, their form of revolt is one that can only be a sort of temporary formation.
Merely to explain what I mean, I will take an extremely crude and even clumsy example first. It does not touch the more distinguished types I have mentioned; but it does show in a very clear and plain shape the sense in which such things are intrinsically fugitive. I mean what may be called the literary use of blasphemy. Earlier, when the spirit of revolt was younger, it was used by some men of genius; by Swinburne, in whose work it seems now to have entirely lost its sting. Recently a modern writer, actually appointed to make a special study of Swinburne, asked wearily how anybody could get excited about the verses which said that the Galilean also would go down to the dead. It also disturbed the fine literature and very confused cosmic philosophy of Thomas Hardy, who tried to say (at the same time) that God did not exist, and that He ought to be ashamed of existing; or possibly that He ought to be ashamed of not existing.
This irritable profanity, which is already rather stale among cultivated people, is apparently still quite fresh to the Communists; but that is because Bolshevist Russia is the most backward State in Europe. It is even said that attempts were made to print atheistic assertions on match-boxes and sell them in England as propaganda. If it is true, they must have a very queer idea of England, to suppose that its somewhat too inert populace could be roused to universal civil war by bad language printed on a match-box. But the only point here is that this sort of bad language, like all bad language, necessarily weakens itself by use. The literature of atheism is bound to fail, exactly in proportion as it succeeds. The Bolshevists have not merely tried to abolish God, which some think a trick needing some ingenuity. They have tried to make an institution of the abolition of God; and when the God is abolished, the abolition is abolished. There can never be any future for the literature of blasphemy; for if it fails, it fails; and if it succeeds, it becomes a literature of respectability. In short, all that sort of effect can only be an instantaneous effect; like smashing a valuable vase that cannot be smashed again. The heaven-defying gesture can only be impressive as a last gesture. Blasphemy is by definition the end of everything, including the blasphemer. The wife of Job saw the common sense of this, when she instinctively said, “Curse God and die.” The modern poet, by some thoughtless oversight, so often neglects to die.
This is a very crude and popular instance; but it exactly defines what I mean when I say that all these death-dealing dynamic motions carry the seeds of their own death. And when we turn to the more subtle and suggestive writers, such as those I have named, we shall find that this is exactly their own condition. They are not opening the gates either of heaven or hell; they are in a blind-alley, at the end of which there is no door. They are always philosophising and they have no philosophy. They have not reached that reality, that reason of things, or even that fully realised unreason of things, for which they are obviously and indeed avowedly seeking. But, what is here more to the point, they do not (like the old revolutionists) even know the direction in which they are to seek it. They have failed to discover, not only any purpose in the world, but even any purpose in the will. They are witty, brilliant and fashionable bankrupts. They have come to an end; and they have not come to an End. The earlier rebels were happy in being pioneers of the actual forward movements of their time; as Walt Whitman, axe in hand, walked before the actual march of industrial democracy. But Mr. Aldous Huxley can hardly be roused by the word Democracy. D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, could be roused by the word Industrialism.
So far as that is concerned, the case is simple enough. Lawrence, whom so many moderns have made a sort of test of modernity, was in fact in violent revolt against anything and everything that can be called modern. He did not merely hate industrial machinery and the servile society it has produced. He hated practically all the effects of science and public education and even political progress. All that is very right and proper; but he also hated intellectualism along with industrialism; though why anybody should think industrialism particularly intellectual, I cannot imagine. But he was perfectly right in his revolt against these things; only they are all in their very nature modern or very recent things. He himself was in favour of very ancient things, and notably of one of the most ancient things on the earth, the worship of the earth itself; the Great Mother: Demeter. But he could not, by his own admission, even do this, without almost literally cutting off his own head. It may be regarded, in a thinker, as at least equivalent to cutting his own throat. He confessed himself, in effect, that he could only worship Demeter from the neck downwards. He could only do it by setting the subconsciousness against the consciousness, or in other words, the dreams against the daylight. It is surely a remarkable gospel for an age of realism. In a famous passage he wrote, “In my dark heart gods are,” but added that in his “white mind” they were not, having been washed or whitewashed out by elementary education. But the modern educated mind is not white; it is only pale.
The point is that from every point of view, ancient or modern, his solution is not a solution. A man cannot leave his head at home and send his body dancing through the world and doing as it likes; and there is no earthly reason for supposing that it will do what it ought, from a modern or any other point of view. For instance, if it fancies food, it will steal, and it will steal quite as readily from Communist Stores as from private houses. This is not the beginning of a new life; a gorgeous jungle opening before man as a sort of Mowgli. It is the end of an utterly impossible argument, which cannot be carried any further. A man wallowing in the earth with the animals would not be an animal. He would only be a lunatic; which is the exact opposite of an animal. There was no way out of the intellectual or anti-intellectual impasse into which Lawrence had got himself; except the third road which he never thought of … possibly because it leads to Rome. If mere rationalism is insufficient, we must get above the reason and not below it. The direct appeal to Nature is utterly unnatural. I admit it was weakly conceded by the Pantheists of the first revolutionary phase; now very remote; and many who would pass for pious accepted it. Professor Babbitt has pointed out some of the dangerous concessions in Wordsworth. Another even more orthodox writer expressed the error of that period. He said that we must rise through Nature up to Nature’s God. He was wrong. We must descend from God down to God’s Nature. Nature is only right when seen in the light of the highest right; whether it be, as some Humanists would say, in the mind of Man, or as Christians would say, in the mind of God. But they really believe in their God; and Lawrence did not really believe in his Goddess. He passionately disbelieved in everything, except something in which he could not really believe.
Mr. Aldous Huxley, whom I have taken as the other outstanding talent of that time, sees this impossibility and avoids it. But he can only avoid it by cutting down his own standard to something so thin that it can hardly stand. In one of his novels a character sums up much of the general teaching of the author, by saying that Man must not hope to be either an animal or an angel. He adds, significantly, that it is a tight-rope sort of business. Now walking on a tight-rope is both difficult and dangerous; and the author makes the good life really more difficult than it is for an ascetic. He has not only to avoid being an animal, but he must guard against any unlucky accident that might turn him into an angel. That is, he is forbidden to have the enthusiasms and spiritual ambitions that have sustained the saints, and yet he has got to become in cold blood something much more exceptional than a saint. Nobody asks such a realist as Mr. Huxley to idealise the real. But such a realist must surely know that human nature cannot show, at every instant, the valour and vigilance of a spiritual tight-rope walker, cannot suffer more for this ideal than all the heroes, and yet be forbidden even to idealise its own ideal. The plan of life is simply obviously unworkable; where the plans of the wildest mystics and martyrs have proved workable.
I say that I do not abhor these men as the first figures of an advancing anarchist army. On the contrary, I admire these men as the last figures of a defeated anarchist army. I take these two original and forcible writers as types of many others; but the point is that they are not, like the anarchists of history, at the head of an army marching in a determined direction. That is exactly what they are not. Lawrence rushed out against almost everything; Huxley, being more sensitive, recoils from almost everything. But, however valuable be the vivid description of the one or the sharp criticism of the other, they are not valuable as guides; and certainly not as guides to a revolution. They had not the simplification given either by religion or irreligion. There was something grand about D. H. Lawrence groping blindly in the dark; but he really was in the dark, not only about the Will of God, but about the will of D. H. Lawrence. He was ready to go anywhere; but he did not really know where to go next. Aldous Huxley is ideally witty; but he is at his wit’s end.
Now of course there are numberless copyists and followers calling themselves revolutionary, who would say that they knew where to go; simply because they are content with some conventional word like Communism. For Communism is almost the same word as convention; it means people getting “together”, and nothing else. But that very fact illustrates what I say, when I say that the army is short of ammunition and the end is near. When the great democratic movement began, it was supported by real democratic emotions. Only Comradeship can be the soul of Communism; for otherwise it has no soul. But the more we note the actual temper of the new rebels, the more we shall note that all that is gone. The men who call themselves Communists are not Comrades. Their tone is bitterly individualistic, and bitterly critical. When Walt Whitman looked at a crowd, it is really true to say that he loved the crowd. When a modern poet, imitating the free verse of Whitman (which was the least free thing about him), describes a crowd, it is always to describe his disgust with the crowd. They have none of the natural sentiments that would correspond with their unnatural dogmas. In other words, the army is short of powder, short of passion, short of the primary impulses that make such an army act. For they are not a vanguard advancing, they are the end of a revolutionary adventure, both for good and evil, which began more than a hundred years ago; and they are fighting the rearguard action of a retreat. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity really meant something to the emotions of those who first used the phrase. But Fraternity is the last emotion anyone is likely to find in an acrid article or poem by a modern rebel; Liberty is lost in both systems, old and new; and Equality only remains in the form of a dull attempt at uniformity, copied from that very mechanical capitalism which the rebels would reject.
Along with those who accept the thing as a label, or hope fallaciously that they may accept it as a fashion, there are some who accept it in a more noble but very negative way; for the very reasons I have urged in this article. I mean that they accept it desperately, as the only way out of an intellectual impasse. It is not too much to say that Mr. Middleton Murry accepts Soviets with the gestures of a great heathen accepting suicide. He seems to exult in the thought of it being the end of everything, or at least the end of nearly everything he likes. That is yet another example of the psychology I have attempted to describe; the psychology of men who have come to the end. I do not want to confuse this distinct impression with jaded journalistic talk about pessimism. People will call Mr. Aldous Huxley a pessimist; in the sense of one who makes the worst of it. To me he is that far more gloomy character; the man who makes the best of it. He gives the best advice he can; in conditions of converging impossibility. I do not write here in a hostile spirit about any of these recent realistic or revolutionary writers; on the contrary, I sincerely sympathise with them, because, unlike the earlier revolutionists, they know they are in an intellectual hole. Doubtless, there are thousands of gay and buoyant innovators, who are not intelligent enough to know it. But the same plan of defeat is spread over the whole situation. It can be seen, for instance, in the thousands of thoughtless “sexual” novels, the writers of which are evidently unconscious that they have got into a logical contradiction about the whole position of sex. They inherit the notion that sex is a serious crux and crisis; for indeed this is necessary to the very nature of a novel. In this they are living on the last legacy of Romanticism; which, in its turn, was living on the last legacy of religion. But their new and simple philosophy teaches them that sex is only the sort of necessity that is also a triviality; that sex is no more crucial than smoking. So that the modern novelist, torn between two ideas, has to attempt to write a story about a man who smokes twenty cigarettes and tries to think that each of them is a crisis. In all these things there is an intellectual tangle; the sort of thing that eventually tightens and throttles. Of this sort of philosopher it is exactly and literally true to say that, if you give him rope enough, he will hang himself. It is consoling to reflect that suicide holds a sublime place in his philosophy.
WALTER DE LA MARE It has not always been sufficiently understood that a critic of poetry should be a poetical critic. Literary history is littered with the disasters of good critics who become bad critics, merely by colliding with good poets. But one of the first facts which a good poetical critic will realise, is one which the poet of necessity realises: the limitation of language, and especially the poverty and clumsiness of the language of praise. There is hardly any praise of poets that does not sound as if they were all the same sort of poets, and this is true even when the praise is intended to say precisely the opposite. Thus the habit of calling somebody “unique” has become universal, and we may insist that a man is original, and still leave the impression that originality is about as rare as original sin.
But this difficulty applies in a special way to Mr. Walter de la Mare and his poetry, because the common poetical terms of praise for that poetry are also applied to a totally different sort of poetry. He stands very close, in time and place and appearance, to a group of writers, most of them good writers and some of them great writers, from whom he is really quite free and distinct. Only the epithets applied to him are also applied to them. When we say that he is a dreamy and fantastic poet, an interpreter of elfland, a singer of strange rhymes that have a witchery and wild charm for children, and the rest, we are driven to use a number of terms that have now become a little trite, perhaps, as applied to other talented persons who are utterly different. The fountains, the foundations, the primary principles of imagination and the view of life, are really quite different in a man like Mr. de la Mare from all that they are, let us say, in a man like Sir James Barrie or a man like Mr. A. A. Milne. This, I need hardly say, has nothing to do with depreciating these authors, but only with appreciating each author for his own sake. Yet there is a sort of tangle of tradition, and a recognised traffic in certain subjects, which may well confuse a modern reader about all this sort of literature of fancy. For instance; we might start by saying that the tradition of Treasure Island and its pirates was continued in Peter Pan and its pirates. We might say that the elvish children of Peter Pan were continued in the elvish children of When We Were Very Young. And then we might imagine vaguely that all this sort of thing, the bottle of rum and the crocodile’s dinner and the king’s breakfast, were all somehow stuffed or stirred up together in a hotch-potch called Peacock Pie. But this is to miss the whole point about the poet, and especially where he is rather more than a poet. It would be easy to link him up with the tradition of Treasure Island; for he has himself written a very fascinating fantasia about Desert Islands. But the association would be an error, for he has not really laid up for himself treasure in the same sort of treasure islands. There is really a sort of dynasty, a Scottish dynasty, of Stevenson and Barrie. But it descended on the infantile side to Scots like Kenneth Graham and on the manly, or at least boyish side to Scots like John Buchan. It has nothing to do with Walter de la Mare; because his philosophy is different. One way of putting it would be to say that, poetic as are the fairy-tales of the Scots, they are the fairy-tales of the Sceptics. The fairy-tales of de la Mare are not those of the Sceptic but of the Mystic. Take the primary idea with which all the best work for imaginative infancy, as supplied by Stevenson and Barrie, really began. It began with an idea which is called “make-believe”. That is, strictly speaking, it is written by men who do not believe; and even written for children who do not believe; children who quite logically and legitimately make believe. But de la Mare’s world is not merely a world of illusion; it is in quite another sense a world of imagination. It is a real world of which the reality can only be represented to us by images. De la Mare does not, in the material sense, believe that there is an ogre who crawls round houses and is turned back by the influence of the Holy Child; any more than Barrie believes that there is an immortal little boy who plays physically in Kensington Gardens. But de la Mare does believe that there is a devouring evil that is always warring with innocence and happiness; and Barrie does not believe that innocence and happiness go on having an uninterrupted legal occupation of Kensington Gardens. Stories of the school of Peter Pan are radiant and refreshing dreams; but they are dreams. They are the dreams of somebody taking refuge from real life in an inner life of the imagination; but not necessarily of somebody believing that there is also a larger universal life corresponding to that imagination. The first is a fabulist but the second is a symbolist; as if we were to compare the talking animals of La Fontaine with the typical animals of Blake. Blake (though certainly mad in a quiet way) probably did not believe that golden lions and tigers walked about on the hills of Albion; and La Fontaine did not believe that garrulous lions engaged in chatty conversation with foxes. But Blake did believe that certain tremendous truths, only to be shown under the types of golden lions, were really true; and, what is most important of all, were not only within him, but beyond him. So the conversation of Mr. Milne’s funny little pigs and bears is as delightful as La Fontaine, and only deceptive in the same sense as La Fontaine. That is to say, it is not false, because it is fictitious; or what was called fabulous. But the rhymes of the Mad Prince, though they would be called fantastic, are not merely fabulous. The Mad Prince, like the Mad Poet, in the person of poor Blake, is, after all, something essentially different from The Mad Hatter. There are hollow undertones in his queer questions, about green grass for graves, which do really re-echo from things deep and secret as the grave.
Many who remember the apparently nonsensical nursery rhymes which figure among Walter de la Mare’s verses for children may imagine that I am drawing a fine distinction; but it is not a distinction of degree but of direction. The parrot and the monkey who attended the dwarfs on the Isle of Lone, may seem quite as disconnected from normal natural history as the owl and the pussy-cat who went to sea. But there remains a real distinction, outside all natural history, between unnatural history and supernatural history. Mr. de la Mare’s parrots and monkeys are as symbolical as the strange beasts in the Book of Apocalypse. Only they are symbolical in a sense that means something better than the allegorical. Symbolism is superior to allegory, in so far that the symbol exactly fits; and there is therefore no superfluous explanation that needs to pass through ordinary language, or need be, or indeed can be, translated into other words. If a parrot only means speech, or a monkey only means mischief (as he generally does) then nothing beyond pictorial elegance is gained by not dealing directly with mischief, or speaking plainly about speech. And the mere allegory never gets beyond a pictorial elegance, adorning what might well be unadorned. But the great mystic can sometimes present to us a purple parrot or a sea-green monkey, in exactly such a manner as to suggest submerged or mysterious ideas, and even truths, that could not possibly be conveyed by any other creature of any other colour. The meaning fits the symbol and the symbol the meaning; and we cannot separate them from each other, as we can in the analysis of allegory. And there is a side of spiritual life, so to speak, which might well be represented by sea-green monkeys, whose colouring is not merely arbitrary colouring like that of the mysterious monsters in that admirable but purely nonsensical rhyme about the Jumblies, whose heads were green and whose hands were blue. The colour scheme here is pleasing, but it is no disrespect to the great Mr. Lear of the Nonsense Rhymes, to say that his cosmic philosophy would not have been convulsed even if their hands had been green and their heads had been blue. Walter de la Mare’s nonsense is never nonsensical in that sense. If his monkey is sea-green, it is for some reason as deep and significant as the sea; even though he cannot express it in any other way except by patient and uncomplaining greenness. And he would never mention even a green weed, a dock or nettle in a ditch, without meaning it to bear the same witness in the same way.
It is the first paradox about him that we can find the evidence of his faith in his consciousness of evil. It is the second paradox that we can find the spiritual springs of much of his poetry in his prose. If we turn, for instance, to that very powerful and even terrible short story called Seaton’s Aunt, we find we are dealing directly with the diabolic. It does so in a sense quite impossible in all the merely romantic or merely ironic masters of that nonsense that is admittedly illusion. There was no nonsense about Seaton’s Aunt. There was no illusion about her concentrated and paralysing malignity; but it was a malignity that had an extension beyond this world. She was a witch; and the realisation that witches can occasionally exist is a part of Realism, and a test for anyone claiming a sense of Reality. For we do not especially want them to exist; but they do. Now the wonderland of the other charmers of childhood consists entirely of things that we want to exist or they want to exist. Whether they are of the older English or Victorian school of Lewis Carroll and Lear, or of the later Scottish school of Stevenson and Barrie, their whole aim is to create a sort of cosmos within the cosmos, which shall be free from evil; a crystal sphere in which there shall be no cracks or flaws or clouds of evil. Peter Pan is a wonderful evocation of the happy daydreams of childhood. There is plenty of fighting and ferocity; because fighting and ferocity are among the very happiest dreams of a really innocent and Christian childhood. But Captain Hook the Pirate is not really wicked; he is only ferocious; which, after all, it is his simple duty as an honest and industrious pirate to be. But there are rhymes, even nursery rhymes, of Walter de la Mare in which the shiver is a real shiver, not only of the spine but of the spirit. They have an atmosphere which is not merely thrilling, but also chilling. They lay a finger that is not of the flesh on a nerve that is not of the body; in their special way of suggesting the chill of change or death or antiquity. To do this was against the whole purpose and origin of the fairyland of the later Victorians. Like all literature, it cannot really be understood without reference to history; and, like all history, it cannot really be understood without reference to religion. As scepticism gradually dried up the conventional religion of the English, and even of the Scotch, poetic and humane spirits turned more and more to the construction of an inner world of fancy, that should be both a refuge and a substitute. William Morris, one of the most large and humane of these later Victorians, admitted it in acknowledging the purely decorative vision in his own work:
So with this earthly Paradise it is, If you will read aright and pardon me Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.
And it is the irony of the case that these men, who were rationalists and realists about the real world, were for that very reason resolved to be radiant optimists when once they were inside the city of dreams which was their city of refuge. The pessimists insisted on having happy dreams; the sceptics insisted on having omnipotent drugs. But the mystic does not deal in dreams but in visions; that is, in things seen and not seeming. The mystic does not desire drugs but the drinking of that wine that wakes the dead; different in nature from any opiate that soothes the living.
In short, we may say that the early twentieth century presented two movements towards the fanciful or fantastical, and away from the merely rational or material: a centripetal movement and a centrifugal movement. The one spiritual spiral worked inwards, towards the secret subjective dreams of man; the other worked outwards towards the spiritual powers or truths that seemed beyond the reach of man. The new world made by the first was the great, glowing, iridescent bubble of the Barrie daydream; the world revealed by the second was that world of strange skies, at the ends of the earth and the corners of the sea, that appears in the far-off flashes of the de la Mare imagination. We might say shortly that Stevenson and Barrie could produce grisly buccaneers dripping with gore without frightening the children; whereas de la Mare could produce pollarded willows or whitewashed barns with an imminent risk of frightening the children, and even the grownup people. But it is only fair to say that there is a subtlety only possible to the first method, as well as a subtlety possible to the second. It is, as has been already suggested, the subtlety of an irony which at once accepts and discounts illusion. It is the whole point of the best work of Barrie, for instance, that somebody is deceiving himself, but also that somebody is looking on at somebody who is deceiving himself; and if they are both deceiving themselves, so much the better for the third person who is looking on from a third angle. Much of this sort of work is like a world of mirrors reflected in mirrors; the reduplication of reflection; the shadow of a shade. To name but one instance: a fairy-tale palace is itself only a fancy; but the court scene in A Kiss for Cinderella is not merely the fairy-tale fancy, but a child’s fancy about the fancy. This sort of intensive imaginative delicacy is in theory a thing of infinite possibilities; and this does belong to the merely subjective school of symbolism. But what I have called the truly symbolic school of symbolism does still belong altogether to another and, I cannot but think, a larger world. It is all that world of the powers and mysteries beyond mankind which even the sceptic would consent to cover with the celebrated label: “Important, If True”. Perhaps as good an example as can be found is in that truly extraordinary sketch by de la Mare called “The Tree”. I can imagine multitudes of quite intelligent people totally unable to make head or tail of it. It is concerned with a fruit merchant and his brother, who was an artist, and with a Tree, which is talked of in a manner utterly indescribable; as if it were not only more important than anything, but were outside the world. Now Barrie might have dealt admirably with a theme like that; and probably made the human comedy clearer. But the difference is precisely this. Even the reader who cannot understand anything else about de la Mare’s story does definitely understand this: that somehow the fruit merchant was wrong, and the artist was right; and, above all, the Tree was right. Now if Barrie had told the tale, he would have taken a gentle pride in leaving us in doubt on that very point; of suggesting that the sceptic might be the sane man, and the Tree might be a delusion. But the Tree is not a delusion.
THE MEANING OF METRE
Did Bret Harte imitate Swinburne? Or (more pleasing thought) did Swinburne imitate Bret Harte? Did Swinburne wrestle in spirit with the admirable poem called “The Heathen Chinee”, and then start up from his reading inspired and inflamed to write the great Greek tragedy of “Atalanta in Calydon”? To some academic and pedantic minds I know that this will not appear an exact literary comparison; though it covers a small point that may be called a curiosity of literature. To them it will sound as if I suggested that John Ruskin was merely a plagiarist of Josh Billings. Anyhow, it is a rather curious coincidence that there is one particular poetical metre, consisting of a quatrain and one long line at the end, which is found nowhere else in all literature, so far as I know, except in the finest and most tragic chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta and in the poem of the Heathen Chinee. It would be possible to get quite a pleasing poetical effect by interleaving the verses of the one with the verses of the other and thus producing a complete and continuous poem, all to the same beautiful tune and combining (as only the greatest masterpieces can do) the qualities of the humanist and the humorist; the elements of the grave and gay. There is no space here to weave the whole of the two narratives together; but a verse or two will show that they move with the same melody in the same metre.
0 would that with feet Unsandaled, unshod, Over-bold, over-fleet, I had swum not nor trod From Arcadia to Calydon northward a blast of the envy of God.
Which expressions are strong, Yet would feebly imply Some account of a wrong Not to call it a lie That was worked upon William my pardner, and the same being W. Nye.
It may be urged maliciously, by the unmelodious, that the identity is a mere accident of arrangement on the page; since the long line could be divided or the short lines linked up. But this is not true. That last long rolling line is really unique, like a wave sweeping away all that went before. And the moral is that metre is not artificial but elemental; it is smooth like Niagara. That long rushing line does express the sea-worship of Swinburne; that long meandering line does express the detached lucidity of Truthful James. Since then, writers have broken writing to bits to make it explosive. The other Truthful James—I allude to Henry James—began it with a shower of commas; the more modern poets are quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the words. Others would make an explosion, or at least a noise, by some line like, “Burst. Blast. Burst-Blast back-blasted. Bang!” But it is not really even so noisy as a line like, “Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas”; because it somehow suggests, not a natural noise that cannot be stopped, but an artificial noise that actually is stopped, if only by full stops. Metre is more natural than free verse; because it has more of the movement of nature, and the curves of wind and wave.
CONCERNING A STRANGE CITY
Everyone has his own private and almost secret selection among the examples of the mysterious power of words, the power which a certain verbal combination has over the emotions and even over the soul. It is a commonplace that literature sometimes has a charm, not merely in the sense of the charm of a woman, but of the charm of a witch. Historical scholars question how the ignorant imagination of the Dark Ages distorted the poet Virgil into a magician; and one answer to the question, possibly, is that he was one. Theologians and philosophers debate about the inspiration of scripture; but perhaps the most philosophical argument, for certain scriptural sayings being inspired, is simply that they sound like it. The great lines of the poets are like landscapes or visions; but the same strange light can be found not only in the high places of poetry but in quite obscure corners of prose. And, in my own personal case, there are no words in literature that more directly produce this indescribable effect than a few that appear, almost accidentally, in one episode of Malory’s romance of Arthur. They occur in one of the visions of Sir Galahad; or it may be Sir Percivale, for the rest of the scene has rather faded from my memory, save for the constellation of words that shines in the midst of it. But I think that St. Joseph of Arimathea shows the knight a vision of a veiled object; presumably the Holy Grail. And he adds the sentence: “But you shall see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place.”
The soul of this, of course, escapes analysis; but for all that, an attempt at analysis has certain aspects of interest. I can only express what I mean by saying that it is the finite part of the image that really suggests infinity. Most worthy and serious people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual world. Some dismal and disgusting people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual plane. And the immediate chill and disenchantment of these changes is due to a vague but vivid sense that the spiritual thing has become less real. A world sounds like an astronomical diagram, and a plane sounds like a geometrical diagram; and both these are abstractions. But a place is not an abstraction, but an actuality. And the writer not only says definitely that it is a place, but he gives it a definite name like the name of a place. Sarras is not an abstraction; it is not even an allegory. It is not even as if he had said the City of Heaven or the City of Paradise. These, though not unreal, are at least universal. But the name given has identity, which is something much more intense than universality. Sarras only means Sarras, as Sarum only means Sarum, or (for that matter) as Surbiton only means Surbiton. But the very fact that we have never heard of it before, and that it is never mentioned again, that it is referred to in passing and without explanation, gives a curious intensity to the hint of something at once distant and definite. The spiritual thrill is all in the idea that the place is a place, however spiritual; that it is some strange spot where the sky touches the earth, or where eternity contrives to live on the borderland of time and space.
I wish there were a real philosophy of comparative religion, and one that was not full of inhuman nonsense. I wish it did not tend to one particular trick of unreason, as for instance when Mr. Wells says that the Christian sacrament of bread and wine was a break-back to primitive blood sacrifices. Or sometimes a man will say that the feeling about a Madonna is only the revival of the worship of Isis, or that the idea of St. Michael smiting Satan is the same as that about Mithras who slew a bull. Now there are many other more historical objections to this sort of thing, but my primary objection to it is that it not only puts the cart before the horse, but gives me directions for finding my own horse in my own stable, by looking for a primitive Mycenaean chariot of which no traces remain. Instead of explaining x by saying it is equal to 5, it undertakes to explain 5 by saying it is equal to x. It is as if a man said, “You may not be aware that your feelings about your wife are best described as those of the Missing Link at the sight of an oyster shell.” I know what a Christian feels about the idea that Michael smote a rebel angel. I do not in the least know what a Mithraist felt about the idea that Mithras killed a bull. It may really have been something like the Christian feeling, for all I know; it may also have been the worst sort of heathen feeling, for all I know. But to have the thing that I do know explained to me by the thing that I don’t know, is like nonsense out of Alice in Wonderland. It is offering something inexplicable to explain something that needs no explanation. I cannot tell whether anybody really felt anything about Isis comparable to what men feel about Mary; if anybody did, I am sure I congratulate him. But I decline to have my own feelings revealed to myself, in the light of some remote alleged feelings that no man alive has ever felt. But though there is this abyss of agnosticism between dead faiths and living ones, and between religions that are experienced and religions that are only explored, it might be possible to establish some human connection if the people who did it were more human. If they took the simple things that really are similar, instead of merely trying to assimilate the civilised things to the barbaric things, they might really bridge some of those abysses in the name of the brotherhood of men. If they were not so anxious to say that the sacrament and the sacrifice were both cannibal orgies (which is nonsense) they might say that they were both sacrifices, and had something to do with the philosophy of sacrifice, which is sense. And then, instead of having less respect for the Christians, we might have more respect for the cannibals. If they were not so anxious to compare the Virgin to a heathen goddess, they might possibly compare them both to a human mother, and at least get near to something human, if not to something divine. And in the same way, if they were not so eager to compare a shrine or a sacred soil to fetishism and taboo, they might get some sort of glimpse of what all men mean by making a deity local, or talking of a spiritual place.
At least in the mind of man, if not in the nature of things, there seems to be some connection between concentration and reality. When we want to ask, in natural language, whether a thing really exists or not, we ask if it is really “there” or not. We say “there”, even if we do not clearly understand where. A man cannot enter a house by five doors at once; he might do it if he were an atmosphere; but he does not want to be an atmosphere. He has a stubborn subconscious belief that an animal is greater than an atmosphere. In proportion as a thing rises in the scale of things, it tends to localise and even narrow its natural functions. A man cannot absorb his sustenance through all his pores like a sponge or some low sea-organism; he cannot take in an atmosphere of beef or an abstract essence of buns. Any buns thrown at him, as at the bear at the zoo, must be projected with such skill as to hit a particular hole in his head. In nature, in a sense, there is choice even before there is will; the plant or bulb narrows itself and pierces at one place rather than another; and all growth is a pattern of such green wedges. But however it be with these lower things, there has always been this spearlike selection and concentration in man’s conception of higher things. And compared with that there is something not only vague but vulgar in most of the talk about infinity. The pantheist is right up to a certain point, but so is the sponge.
Both vitally and verbally, this infinity is the enemy of all that is fine. Such philological points are sometimes more than mere pedantries or mere puns. And it is more than a pedantic pun to say that most things that are fine are finite. We testify to it when we talk of a beautiful thing having refinement or having finish. It is brought to an end like the blade of a beautiful sword; not only to its end in the sense of its cessation but to its end in the sense of its aim. All fine things are in this sense finished, even when they are eternal. Poetry is committed to this concentration fully as much as religion; for fairyland has always been as local, one might say as parochial, as Heaven. And if religion in the recognised sense were removed tomorrow, the poets would only begin to act as the pagans acted. They would begin to say, “Lo, here”, and “Lo, there”, from the incurable itch of the idea that the something must be somewhere, and not merely anywhere. Even if it were in some sense found to be in everything, it would still be in everything and not merely in all. And if men did indeed seek the secret in primitive sacrifices, it was a secret and not a superficiality like fetish-worship. If they did indeed look for it behind the veil of Isis, it was a secret and not a platitude like nature-worship. And if indeed it is better sought in another fashion, it will be a secret, and therefore a real revelation, for those who see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place.
THE EPITAPH OF PIERPONT MORGAN
It is obvious enough that whitewashing a man is quite the opposite of washing him white. The curious thing is that people often try to whitewash a man, and fail, when it might be possible to wash him, and to some limited extent, succeed. The real story, if the culprit only had the courage to tell it, would often be much more human and pardonable than the stiff suspicious fiction that he tells instead. Many a public man, I fancy, has tried to conceal the crime and only succeeded in concealing the excuse. Many a man has sought to bury the sin and only buried the temptation. Suppose that Nelson had covered his relations with Lady Hamilton so discreetly that he left about his movements only a vague suspicion that he had a wife in every port. We should think him a far worse man than we think him, knowing the whole truth. Suppose Parnell had kept his secret so well that his disappearances were put down to an unmarried man’s most vulgar and purchased type of vice, instead of an unmarried man’s comparatively pardonable fault of infatuation. That great man would seem far less great to us than he does now. In our craven commercial public life there are not many of the Parnell or Nelson sort: but even among our lords and millionaires there are men, I dare say, who are less despicable than they look. If we had the key of their souls we might come upon virtues quite unexpected—or at least upon vices more generous. In many a complex human scandal, I fancy, the first real slander is the acquittal.
But there is another form of this dehumanising defence: and that is the defence of the dead. The idea of observing restraint, if not respect, in speaking of the recently departed rests on a human instinct altogether deep and free: but in modern practice it is turned exactly the wrong way. A dead man should be sacred because he is a man—perhaps a man for the first time. A baby says he is a man; a boy often thinks he is a man; a man takes for granted he is a man, and often finds out his mistake. Perhaps one never knows what being a man means until the instant of death. Perhaps in a very manly and even military sense all life is a learning to die. If I were asked to say something by the grave of a man like Pierpont Morgan, I would say: “I will not remember his name. He has fought the great unequal fight; and is of more value than he was.”
Now turn to the modern newspaper method; the method of weak whitewash. The Christian Commonwealth is a paper with a perfectly genuine, though hazy and patronising, concern for social improvement. Its intentions are certainly not servile, though I think its upshot would be. But it feels as we all do, that the day after poor Morgan’s death is not the time for kicking his corpse about: so, being modern, it contrives to speak well of him in the following extraordinary fashion. “It is easy to denounce the methods by which such men amass their vast fortunes, but, making every allowance for the injury done to individuals by the often ruthless methods such men adopt to gain their ends, the great fact stands out, that they are the human agents working out certain economic movements… . These men are helping to prepare industry for a new form of control and ownership. In the transition stage they amass huge fortunes for themselves, and ruin many who are too weak to withstand them, but it is doubtful if the sum of their harmful inflections is as great as the evils in the same period caused by the great number of small competing capitalists.”
I shall have much to say of this as a social doctrine in a moment. At the start I am only concerned with it as an epitaph. In the mere matter of respect for the dead, I say this. I am ready to pass the grave of Morgan in a decent silence, as a Christian grave. The Christian Commonwealth can only think of sacrificing a thousand slaves upon it, as if it were a pagan and prehistoric grave. For to justify or palliate the capitalist today is to sacrifice a thousand slaves. My epitaph on Morgan need not even contain his name; I would write over his grave what I would over my own, “Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.” But just think how the Christian Commonwealth epitaph reads, merely as an epitaph! “Sacred to the Memory of J. Pierpont Morgan: Who, By Methods Peculiarly Easy to Denounce, Amassed a Large Fortune. Having a Preference for Ruthless Methods For the Gaining of His Ends, He Selected for Ruin Such Persons as Were Too Weak To Withstand Him. He Thus Became The Human Instrument of An Economic and Inhuman Movement. He Also Formed Trusts. For of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” That is the amount of tenderness for the terrible dead that can be reached in the modernist manner. The sacred death is forgotten, but the profane life is excused.
And now for the excuse. In order to write a polite paragraph about a poor old man whose only superiority over any of us is that he has passed what we all must fear, this paper digs up the dusty and discredited rubbish of Bellamy: and maintains the proposition that millionaires bring us nearer to Socialism. The obvious deduction for a Socialist is that he ought to be, in every hour and instant, on the side of the millionaires. No man’s wage must be increased by a penny, no man’s working day must be shortened by an hour; for this might delay the swift, sweet process by which the whole earth will soon be owned by its six most unscrupulous inhabitants. Then we shall get Socialism. I don’t see why. I never did. But it is self-evident that, if this is the case, every capitalist must be exalted and every workman brought low. The whole argument means nothing unless it means that the rich had better smash us all as soon as possible. There are some who doubt this concept. I am one of them. We say it would not have been Napoleon’s best policy to wait till the Allies had conquered him utterly, so that he might only have to write one letter, asking them to give him back the whole of Europe. We say, in our simple way, that it would not have been wise in Montenegro to wait till all the Moslems in Asia were marching upon them; so as to abolish Islam in one well-expressed proclamation. We entertain similar doubts about the sanity of making capitalists stronger than any of the past emperors of this earth, and then asking them to hand over the only thing for which they have lost their souls.
The final fact is that anyone who subscribes to this epitaph must league himself with the forces of evil until something like the Last Judgment. He must not merely give up Socialism, which is a doctrine. He must also give up Social Reform—which is a dissipation. He must not only abandon the duty of helping the poor; he must even tear from his heart the pleasure of tormenting them. I see that one paper (the name of which I forget) has even addressed an open letter to me on this matter, asking whether any of my words (which, I sadly confess, have been many) have born any fruit in practice—by which, of course, it means Westminster. Well, I am afraid I must confess that my efforts have been barren, that I have brought forth no fruit fit for the field of social reform. In all the most powerful modern movements I have been impotent. I have never segregated anybody, or tortured anybody, or unsexed anybody, or buried anybody alive—to my knowledge. I am not a philanthropist. I do not think any words of mine have led to one single man being kept in prison beyond his lawful term. I doubt if I have succeeded in adding a single lash to the torture at the triangles. I question whether I have succeeded in deducting so much as a penny from the tiny fortunes of grooms and housemaids. I have cropped no hair off the heads of other people’s daughters. I have drawn no blood from poorer men’s backs. My claim to be a Progressive is gone for ever; and I know it well. But I am not quite so bitterly opposed to all possible Social Reform as the Christian Commonwealth is. I agree that men like Morgan should be pardoned. I even agree that, for purposes of debate, men like Morgan should be excused. But I shall deny till death and damnation that men like Morgan should be encouraged. And if that epitaph does not mean that men like Morgan should be encouraged, it means nothing whatever.
THE NEW BIGOTRY
I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right. The last occasion is one applied mostly to literature and the ability of literary men. And it is all the more like the old bigotry because it is in opposition to it.
We all know what used to happen sometimes in the Puritan period; or the more critical classicism of the eighteenth century. A young idealistic poet would write a copy of verses; mostly verses somewhat in this style:
O’er rushing waterfall and verdant grove The languid moonlight throws a light of love.
The poet was considered quite respectable; perhaps the poem was even a prize poem. Then it was discovered that the poet, when slightly drunk, had expressed doubts about the exact date of the Book of Habakkuk. There was a terrible scandal; the youth was hurled from his college as an atheist; and then the learned critics went back and looked at his poem with a new darkling and suspicious eye. The “rushing waterfall”, after all, had a very revolutionary sound and hinted at pantheistic anarchy. The phrase “languid moonlight” was an appeal to all the most profligate passions. “Light of love” was a term notoriously of loose significance.
Today it is just the opposite; only equally bigoted. A young idealistic poet, full of the new visions of beauty, writes verses appropriate to such vision; as, for instance:
Bug-house underbogies belch daybreak back-firing. Daylight’s a void-vomit; steadying legs to stump.
And all the young critics know he is all right; he has got cosmic rhythm; he is a regular guy.
And then a horrid whisper goes round that he was seen outside an Episcopal Church near Vermont. The whole horrid truth is soon known. He has admitted to a newspaper man that he believes in God. Then the young critics go back gloomily and stare at his poetry; and, strangely enough, see for the first time that there was something awfully old-fashioned in saying “daylight” when Binx might have said “sky-blank”; and, after all, bogies are just the sort of thing Episcopalians are forced by their bishops to believe in.
This, though some of the worst examples have occurred in England, is a strictly correct biography of a man of genius who has come to us from America—Mr. T. S. Eliot. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Eliot was expelled from Harvard for being a High Churchman, as Shelley was expelled from Oxford for being an atheist. Mr. Eliot’s character was not blasted by a religion until later in life, and after he had said all that can be said for modern scepticism and despair.
But this makes it all the funnier. An English critic actually accused him of asking us “to believe the unbelievable”. Whatever is the sense of calling a thing unbelievable when a man like Eliot already believes it. The author of The Waste Land knows all there is to know about scepticism and pessimism; why not admit that his beliefs are beliefs, and go back to a proper criticism of his literature?
BOOKS FOR BOYS
A recent correspondence upon what is called pernicious literature has given rise to several declarations to the effect that the popular literature which is sold to boys in our day is greatly inferior to that of two or three decades ago. At first sight a reflective person might be inclined to suggest that perhaps there were more psychological elements involved in that far-off boyish enjoyment, and in that, as in many other instances of our youthful pleasures, we were not so much enjoying the stories as enjoying ourselves. It is at least possible that the laudator temporis acti of whom we are speaking would regard the actual task of reading through those lost romances very much in the same way that he would regard the action of a waiter in a restaurant who brought him fourteen penny buns and a plate of bull’s-eyes.
The mental digestion of boys is as strong as their physical digestion. They do not heed the cookery of art any more than the art of cookery. They can eat the apples of the tree of knowledge, and they can eat them raw. It is a great mistake to suppose that boys only read boyish books. Not only do they privately revel in their sisters’ most sentimental novels, but they absorb cartloads of useless information. One boy in particular, with whose career from an early age we have the best reasons for being familiar, used to read whole volumes of Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, and of a very musty and unreliable History of English Trade. The thing was a mere brute pleasure of reading, a pleasure in leisurely and mechanical receptiveness. It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in grazing all day long.
But when all allowance has been made for the omnivorousness of youth, we incline to think that there is probably a considerable amount of truth in the idea that boys’ books have to some extent degenerated. They have degenerated probably for the reason that all forms of art degenerate, because they are despised. Probably they were less despised in the days when they still had upon them, as it were, the glamour of the great masters of historical romance. The spirit of Scott and Ainsworth and Fenimore Cooper remained in them even if it was only the reflection of a hundred reflections and each in a distorting mirror.
No one will ever understand the spirit at the back of popular and juvenile literature until he realises one fact, that a large amount of it is the result of that enthusiasm of the young reader which makes him wish to hear more and more about certain heroes, and read more and more of certain types of books. He dowers the creatures of fiction with a kind of boyish immortality. He is not surprised if Dick Deadshot or Jack Harkaway renews his youth through a series of volumes which reaches further than the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These books have the vital philosophy of youth, a philosophy in which death does not exist, except, indeed, as an external and picturesque incident which happens to villains.
The serious student of this class of books and papers will go on to observe that a very large mass of such works has arisen directly out of the interest taken in some of the creations of great masters. An irresponsible writer for boys early in the century continued the adventures of Pickwick. An interminable book of Oriental adventure which we read in our boyhood was avowedly a supplement to the Arabian Nights, and mingled Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba in one inexhaustible tale. To take a more vulgar example, it is said that “Ally Sloper” is simply an infinitely degraded version of Mr. Micawber; the literary zoologist will trace the same rudimentary organs, the hat, the tie, and the bald head. All this amounts to one of the great laws of the question, the fact that the youthful mind takes hold of certain figures, insists upon them, tears them, as it were, out of the covers of the story, and could follow their adventures in any number of day dreams. Hence one of the essential qualities of this cheap literature— its astonishing voluminousness. A library keeping a record of it would need a dome vaster than the Bodleian.
From this, as we have said, it may be inferred that there is likely enough to have been some decadence of late years, since we are becoming further and further removed from the great historical novelists, who left a kind of glow upon all historic fiction. New literary fashions have arisen, but they are scarcely likely to be imitated in the literature of boys. No publisher has yet brought out with gaudy-coloured illustrations “The Further Adventures of Jude the Obscure”. No penny dreadfuls have been devoted to what eventually happened to Pelleas and Melisande. And in this manner we reach once more the inevitable conclusion about debased forms of art; that they are debased because they are not respected. Everything in the world, from a child to a form of fiction, will be bad until we consent to treat it as good. And of all forms of literature in the world, the one most grossly neglected, from an artistic point of view, is the boys’ book of adventure.
It is a very peculiar fact, that while the educated middle-class at the present day expends infinite money and trouble upon surrounding the child with the noblest works of art and literature, the boy is in this matter treated as if he were a half-witted and inconsiderable savage. The wretched infant of four years old is expected to drink in the verses of Stevenson and the decorative curves of Walter Crane. But when he has imbibed this atmosphere, when his aesthetic hunger has by hypothesis been aroused, when his mind has developed with the rapid development of boyhood, he is suddenly put off with books and papers which are not literature at all. A child’s love for what is pretty is sedulously cultivated as the dawn of an aesthetic sense, but no one seems to realise that a boy’s love of adventure is another aesthetic sense quite equally noble and appropriate. A child’s love of colour is treated as a spiritual thing, a sort of hint of heaven, but a boy’s love of adventure is spoken of as if it were a mere brute appetite, excusable in a growing lad. If a child says, “I like the pretty flowers”, he is applauded for his poetic instinct, but if a boy says, “I like a story about pirates”, he is treated as if he had asked for another slice of pork.
As long as this view continues there can be no worthy school of adventurous fiction. It must be realised that both the child’s love of the pretty and the boy’s love of the bold are sound and admirable artistic instincts. Neither of them shows that the individual is a cherub who cannot be long for this world, but both of them show that he is a well-equipped and healthy human soul. The child in the fairy-tale is canonised for running after a butterfly. The boy in the penny dreadful is denounced for running away to sea. But the sea is more beautiful than any butterflies.
If, then, we are agreed that the first need of the problem is to understand once and for all that the love of adventure is not a temporary savagery to be satisfied, but an essential artistic tendency to be crowned and brought to consummation, it cannot but seriously affect our view of boys’ literature as a whole. We want to realise that the instinct of day dream and adventure is a high spiritual and moral instinct, that it requires neither dilution nor excuse, that it has been the mother of all great travellers and missionaries and knights errant and the patroness of all the brave. The one essential of a writer for boys is that he should not write down to them. He should rather write up, arduously and reverently, as well he may, to the mysterious spirit of youth.
THE OUTLINE OF LIBERTY
There is a quality needed today for the spread of all truth, and especially religious truth, which is very simple and vivid, but which I find it very difficult to fit with a word. So many words have become catchwords.
I suppose that our critics, in their learned way, would have recourse to the little-known Greek word paradox, if I were simply to say that they are not quite broad-minded enough to be Catholics. In their own jargon, being broad-minded so often means being blank-minded.
If I were to say that they suffer from a lack of imagination, they might suppose (heaven help them) that I meant that what we believe is all imaginary. Nor indeed do either of these two terms define the definite thing I intend. It would be nearer the mark if I said that they cannot see all round a subject; or that they cannot see anything against the background of everything else.
The learned man, of what I may call the Cambridge type, is like a man who should spend years in making a minute ordnance map of the country between Cork and Dublin, and never discover that Ireland is an island. It is not a question of understanding something difficult. It is rather a question of opening the mind wide enough to understand something easy. It is not to be attained by years of labour; it is more likely to be attained in a moment of laziness; when the map-maker who has long been poring over the map with his nose close to Cork, may lean back for a moment and suddenly see Ireland. It is much more difficult to get such men to lean back for a moment and see Christendom.
The Catholic Church is always being defined in terms of the particular quarrel that she happens to have with particular people in a particular place. Because the Protestant sects in Northern Europe, for one or two centuries, disapproved of rosaries and incense and candles and confessional boxes, there was a widespread impression that Roman Catholics were simply people who liked confessional boxes and candles and incense and rosaries. But that is not what a Manichee or a Moslem or a Hindoo or an ancient Greek philosopher would say about Roman Catholics.
Buddhists have incense; Moslems have something very like rosaries; and hardly any healthy heathen human being on earth could conceive why anybody should have any particular hatred of candles. Buddhists would say that Catholics were people who insisted on a personal God and personal immortality. Moslems would say that Catholics were people who believed that God had a Son who assumed human form, and who did not think it idolatrous that He should afterwards assume pictorial or sculptural form. Every group in the world would have its own angle or aspect; and the Protestant would hardly recognise the same object which he had only considered in his own aspect.
Nevertheless, each of these, taken in itself, is in a sense narrow; and to dwell upon it narrows the issue. What we want is to have some general impression of the whole background of humanity, especially of heathen humanity, against which we can see the outline of the object, as, in the map of Ireland, the island is seen against the sea.
Now the real background of all that human heathenry is rather a grey background. There are particular patches, which happen to be close to us in place and time, which have been freshly painted in various ways. So freshly painted that nobody knows yet how long the colours will last. As the Imperialists wanted to paint the map red, so the Internationalists and Idealists now want to paint the map pink. But none of them has painted half so much of the map anything as they, in their optimism, have sometimes supposed. And even in the areas where a sort of official optimism prevails, as in parts of America, there is a great deal more of the old ordinary melancholy of men than anyone could gather from newspaper headlines or political programmes. And I believe that the most general philosophy of men left to themselves, and perhaps the most practical illustration of the Fall of Man, is a vague impression of Fate.
If a man will really talk to the poor, in almost any country, I think he will generally find that they are either Christians or fatalists. This fatalism is more or less varied or complicated, of course, in various places by various mythologies or philosophies. It will generally be found that the mythology is a sort of poetry, embodying a worship of the wild forces of nature; a nature-worship which, when broken up, is called polytheism, and, when united, is called pantheism. But there is sometimes very little left of theism in pantheism.
Then there are whole districts where there is true theism which is, nevertheless, permeated with a mood of fatalism. That, I suppose, is true at least of large areas of Islam. Then there are what may be called the philosophies of resignation, which probably cover equally large areas of the ancient civilisation of Asia.
We need not insist here on any controversial points against or even about these things. But I take it as certain that all those notes of recurrence and cosmic rhythm, and a cycle beginning and ending with itself, which repeat themselves so frequently in connection with Buddhism and Brahminism and Theosophy, are in a general sense allied to an almost impersonal submission to an ultimately impersonal law. That is the tone of the whole thing; and, as I have said, the tone or tint of it strikes us as rather grey; or at least, neutral and negative.
It is the same with almost all we know of the pagan myths and metaphysics of antiquity. It is a modern slander on pagans to represent paganism as almost identical with pleasure. But anyhow, nobody acquainted with the great Greek and Latin literature, even in the smallest degree, will ever dream of identifying paganism with optimism. It would at least be a great deal nearer the truth to say that there, as everywhere else, the fundamental character of paganism is pessimism. But in any case, it can quite fairly be said that it is fatalism.
Upon this grey background there is one splash or star of silver or gold; a thing like a flame. It is quite exceptional and extraordinary. Of its many extraordinary characters, this is perhaps the chief; that it proclaims Liberty. Or, as the only true meaning of that term, it proclaims Will. In a strange voice, as of a trumpet from heaven, it tells a strange story, of which the very essence is that it is made up of Will, or of a free divergence of Wills.
Will made the world; Will wounded the world; the same Divine Will gave to the world for the second time its chance; the same human Will can for the last time make its choice. That is the real outstanding peculiarity, or eccentricity, of the peculiar sect called Roman Catholics. And if anyone objects to my limiting so large a conception to Roman Catholics, I willingly agree that there are many who value it so much that they obviously ought to be Roman Catholics. But if anyone says that it is not in fact and history bound up with the Faith of Roman Catholicism, it is enough to refer him to the history and the facts.
Nobody especially emphasised this spiritual liberty until the Church was established. People began instantly to question this spiritual liberty, when the Church began to be broken up. The instant a breach, or even a crack, had been made in the dyke of Catholicism, there poured through it the bitter sea of Calvinism, or in other words, of a very cruel form of fatalism. Since that time, it has taken the much duller form of Determinism. This sadness and sense of bondage is so general to mankind that it immediately made its appearance, when the special spiritual message of liberty was silenced or interrupted anywhere. Wherever that message is heard, men think and talk in terms of will and choice; and they see no meaning in any of the philosophies of fate, whether desperate or resigned.
It is idle to talk to a Catholic about optimism or pessimism; for he himself shall decide whether the universe shall be, for him, the best or the worst of all possible worlds. It is useless to tell him that he might be more at one with the universal life as a Buddhist or a pantheist; for he knows that, in that sense, he might be more at one with the universal life as a turnip or a tree. It is his whole hope and glory that he is not at one with the universal life; but stands out from it, an exception and even a miracle.
There is a great passage in the “Paradiso” of Dante, which I wish I knew enough Italian to appreciate or enough English to translate. But I would commend it to those who may fancy that my emphasis on this exceptional quality is a mere modern whitewashing of a medieval superstition; and especially to those who have been taught in laborious detail, by learned and very stupid historians, to regard medievalism as narrow and enchained. For it runs roughly like this:
The mightiest gift that God of his largesse Made in creation, perfect even as He, Most of His substance, and to Him most dear, He gave to the Will and it was Liberty.
A NOTE ON NUDISM
There is one little habit of some of the most intelligent modern writers against which I should like to protest. It consists of flatly refusing to state somebody else’s opinion as it stands; and consider it on its own merits. The modern writer must always assume that it is a choice between his own extreme opinion and something at the other extreme. I found a curious example in a very excellent book by Miss Cicely Hamilton called Modern Germanies. She was referring to the sect of the Nudists, who have revived the ancient heresy of the Adamites and go about without any clothes, taking themselves very seriously; as if nakedness were a new invention. I think Miss Hamilton really hesitated a little, being moved by her instincts as a civilised person to laugh, and by her instincts as a progressive person to applaud. What then does she do? She immediately repeats the old story that in Paul et Virginie, the very artificial sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, the heroine is drowned because she refuses to take off her clothes. She then adds that “if she has to choose” between Virginie and some German flapper who finds it more comfortable to have no clothes to flap, she will choose the latter. But, first of all, why should she “have to choose”? Why should she not consider Nudism on its own merits; and the normal view of clothes, among sane people, also on its own merits? If I have to judge a drunkard, I will judge him without dragging in the comparison of a mad fakir who deliberately died of thirst in the desert. If I have to judge a miser, I will call him a miser; despite the possible existence of an insane and intoxicated nobleman in Vienna, who poured ten thousand gold coins down a drain. I cannot see why Miss Hamilton should call in one extravagance merely to justify another.
Next, if she really does suppose that normal, traditional or Christian morality are represented by Virginie, she is probably quite wrong. Most Christian authorities would say that her notion of sacrifice came very near to the sin of suicide. For Paul et Virginie was not written in a Christian period but in a very pagan period, when pre-Revolutionary France was in love with the pagan Stoics who did not disapprove of suicide. The story itself is largely founded on an old classical romance. It cannot be taken as typical of modern Christianity, or even of medieval Christianity. It is only fair to remember that in this sense Virginie is a heathen heroine; and Godiva was a Christian heroine.
Lastly, I am not sure I should choose the German flapper, even if I were driven to the choice. We may think a sacrifice is made to a mistaken code of honour; but there is the sacrifice; and there is the honour. We have no reason to suppose that the Nudist even knows what we mean by honour. We know nothing about her, except that she does not know what we mean by dignity. As a plain piece of practical psychology, I think it extremely likely that the poor mistaken maiden, who would die for her dignity, would also die for her country, would die for her friends, would die for her faith or promise, or any worthy obligation. We know nothing about the other woman, except that (like the pig and other animals), she feels more comfortable without clothes. It seems to me an insufficient basis for moral confidence.
CONSULTING THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA
The Historical Student will raise his refined eyebrows if I say that a Catholic is an Encyclopaedist. The name of Encyclopaedism was given in the eighteenth century to the most coldly eager of the enemies of Catholicism. And even now it is generally believed that we bow submissively before the storm of the ephemeral Encyclical, but dare not open the scientific and solid Encyclopaedia— which, by the way, is generally at any given moment much more out of date than the Encyclical.
It is none the less true that the Catholic Church presents itself, though on a higher plane and plan, in a certain double character to which perhaps the nearest natural parallel is the use of an encyclopaedia. For it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want. It advises the particular man upon his particular problem, though it were quite a private problem, almost as if it were giving private advice. And the man must be so far touched to some tinge of healthy humility, if it be only the admission that he does not know everything, and must seek outside himself for something. Even if he is so ill-advised as to consult a medical work of reference for the proper proportions of hyoscine for the poisoning of an aunt, he must be so far in a pious and respectful attitude and accepting something upon a sort of authority.
I remember a man who told me he never accepted anything on any sort of authority; I also remember asking him whether he ever consulted Bradshaw, or whether he insisted on travelling by every train first, to see whether it was safe to travel by it. The journey itself might be highly private, the visit to the aunt almost pressingly private, but he would not evolve a railway train entirely out of his private judgment.
But a work of reference works in another way also. It reminds the traveller in the train that there are a good many other trains full of travellers. It reminds the neoethical nephew that there are a good many different words in the dictionary. In his search for hyoscine he will pass carelessly over the honey of Hymettus, and think it needless to dwell on the life of Heliogabalus or the science of hydraulics. And thus he will learn the same lesson in another way; the somewhat difficult lesson that he is nobody except himself.
Those two discoveries commonly combine in a conversion; and this is perhaps the most workable framework in which to state the two chief elements of my own. There was first the relation of Catholicism to my own original and personal problem; and there was a second rather curious and illuminating illustration of the necessity of keeping it in proportion to all the other problems, the problems of all the other people.
Now all the very varied types of people who sooner or later draw near to the Catholic Faith have moved towards it from the most widely different standpoints, across most varying distances, and rejecting or renewing or reshaping the most queerly contrasted types of non-Catholic thought. My own thought, when it was not yet Catholic, was often blasted with the name of Optimist; but it was not quite so bad as that sounds today. It was an attempt to hold on to religion by the thread of thanks for our creation; by the praise of existence and of created things. And the curious part of it is that I found that this piece of private judgment, or private nonsense, was really much more true than I ever thought it was; and yet, if that truth were left to stand alone, it would be a complete falsehood.
For the sake of illustration, or in a rather special sense of illumination, I will take the metaphor of a window; a thing which always had, and still has, an almost weirdly vivid effect on my own imagination. My own original view, which would originally have been an entirely non-Catholic if not anti-Catholic view, might be roughly stated thus. “After all, what could be more mystical or magical than ordinary daylight coming in through an ordinary window? Why should anybody want a new heaven shining on a new earth; why need they dream of strange stars or miraculous flames, or the sun and moon turned to blood and darkness, in order to imagine a portent? The mere fact of existence and experience is a perpetual portent. Why should we ever ask for more?”
There is an old literary joke or game, familiar I think among the transcendental tricks of the Cavalier poets; a game that is called echo verses. It is a sort of punning upon the last syllable of a word; by which Echo is made to answer mockingly the question asked in the line of verse. Thus, to transfer it to a modern topic, the poet might ask, “Say, what high hope is founded on eugenics?” And the obliging echo would answer, “Nix”; or a paean in praise of some Socialist or ex-Socialist statesman would begin with the line, “Labour’s great leader; mighty Democrat”, and end with the repetition, “Rat”.
I am haunted by this parallel in the curious logical answer to my own question; which was at once a repetition and a contradiction and a completion. For it seemed to me that when I asked that question, “Why is not the daylight enough?” the ancient voice of some mystery such as an old religion answered my words merely by repeating them, “Why is not the daylight enough?” And when I said, “Why should not that wonderful white fire, breaking through the window, inspire us every day like an ever-returning miracle?” the echo out of that old crypt or cavern only answered, “Why not indeed?”
And, the more I thought of it, the more I thought that there was the hint of some strange answer in the very fact that I had to ask the question. I had not lost, and I have never lost, the conviction that such primal things are mysterious and amazing; but if they were amazing, why did anybody have to remind us that they were amazing? Why was there, as I had already realised that there certainly was, a sort of daily fight to appreciate the daylight; to which we had to summon all imagination and poetry and the labour of the arts to aid us? If the first imaginative instinct was right, it seemed clearer and clearer that something else was wrong. And as I indignantly denied that there was anything wrong with the window, I eventually concluded that there was something wrong with me.
In this case, the divine dictionary had answered my own personal question as directly and even personally as if the answer had been written for me. It justified the instinct that inspired me to accept the daylight as a divine reality; but it also solved the problem that puzzled me about the difficulty of thus accepting the daylight all day and every day. Creation was of the Creator and declared as good; the power in it could be praised by angels forever and by the sons of God shouting for joy. If we were ourselves only occasionally overheard in the act of shouting for joy, it was because we were only partially or imperfectly the sons of God; not indeed wholly disinherited, but not wholly domesticated. In short, we suffered by the Fall or Original Sin; but it is important to note that this is not an answer to the particular question, except in the form of the more moderate Catholic doctrine, and not the old pessimist Protestant doctrine of the Fall.
This particular problem arose entirely out of the fact that man is imperfect; but not, in the pessimist sense, perfectly imperfect. The whole paradox is in the fact that a part of his mind remains almost perfect; and he can perpetually perceive what he cannot perpetually enjoy. I was as certain that existence is ecstatically more excellent than non-existence as I was that plus two is different from minus two. Only there is a practical psychological difficulty about always going into ecstasies over this fact. Man is not symmetrically unsymmetrical; he is a sort of one-eyed creature ever since he fought a duel with the devil; and the one eye sees the eternal light eternally, while the other has grown tired and blinks or is almost blind. Thus the authority solved this private problem, not by denying the truth of my private judgment, but by adding to it the larger and more general judgment of the Fall.
And then, in the very act of understanding my own little private problem, I understood the public authority which I have compared to an encyclopaedia. Here there were thousands of other private problems solved for thousands of other private persons; masses of them had nothing to do with my own case at all; but one of them turned and confronted my own case in a curious way. I began to realize that it would not do to act as so many of the most brilliant men of my time had acted. It was not enough for a man to value a truth merely because he had picked it up by himself; to take it away with him and turn it into a private system; at the best into a philosophy and at the worst into a sect. He was very proud of answering his own question without the help of an encyclopaedia; but he did not even pretend to answer all the other questions in the encyclopaedia.
Now I felt very strongly that there ought to be answers, not only to all the other questions which all the other people were asking, but also answers to other questions which I should ask myself. And the moment I began to think about these other problems I saw at once that I could not even satisfy myself with the solution of one of those problems. The practical example which occurred to me was this. I said to myself; it is all very well to say that the miracle of daylight coming through a window ought to be enough to make a man dance with joy. But suppose another man uses your argument as a justification for putting innocent men in prison for life, in a cell with one window, and then leaving them to dance. What will become of all your own denunciations of slavery and the oppression of the poor, when that highly practical statesman has founded a new commonwealth on your new creed?
And then I think there spread out before me, like a vast dazzling plan with innumerable details, some vision of the thousand things that have to be interrelated and balanced in Catholic thought; justice as well as joy; liberty as well as light; and I felt certain that the mere proportion of all these things, not the negation of any of them, needed, to harmonize it and hold it steady, a power and a presence mightier than the mind of any mortal man.
IF I HAD ONLY ONE SERMON TO PREACH
If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
Now the first fact to note about this notion is a rather curious one. Of all such notions, it is the one most generally dismissed in theory and most universally accepted in practice. Modern men imagine that such a theological idea is quite remote from them; and, stated as a theological idea, it probably is remote from them. But, as a matter of fact, it is too close to them to be recognised. It is so completely a part of their minds and morals and instincts, I might almost say of their bodies, that they take it for granted and act on it even before they think of it. It is actually the most popular of all moral ideas; and yet it is almost entirely unknown as a moral idea. No truth is now so unfamiliar as a truth, or so familiar as a fact.
Let us put the fact to a trifling but not unpleasing test. Let us suppose that the reader, or (preferably) the writer, is going into a public-house or some public place of social intercourse; a public tube or tram might do as well, except that it seldom allows of such long and philosophical intercourse as did the old public house. Anyhow, let us suppose any place where men of motley but ordinary types assemble; mostly poor because the majority is poor some moderately comfortable but rather what is snobbishly called common; an average handful of human beings. Let us suppose that the enquirer, politely approaching this group, opens the conversation in a chatty way by saying, “Theologians are of opinion that it was one of the superior angelic intelligences seeking to become the supreme object of worship, instead of finding his natural joy in worshipping, which dislocated the providential design and frustrated the full joy and completion of the cosmos”. After making these remarks the enquirer will gaze round brightly and expectantly at the company for corroboration, at the same time ordering such refreshments as may be ritually fitted to the place or time, or perhaps merely offering cigarettes or cigars to the whole company, to fortify them against the strain. In any case, we may well admit that such a company will find it something of a strain to accept the formula in the above form. Their comments will probably be disjointed and detached; whether they take the form of “Lorlumme” (a beautiful thought slurred somewhat in pronunciation), or even “Gorblimme” (an image more sombre but fortunately more obscure), or merely the unaffected form of “Garn”; a statement quite free from doctrinal and denominational teaching, like our State compulsory education. In short, he who shall attempt to state this theory as a theory to the average crowd of the populace will doubtless find that he is talking in an unfamiliar language. Even if he states the matter in the simplified form, that Pride is the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, he will only produce a vague and rather unfavourable impression that he is preaching. But he is only preaching what everybody else is practising; or at least is wanting everybody else to practise.
Let the scientific enquirer continue to cultivate the patience of science. Let him linger—at any rate let me linger— in the place of popular entertainment whatever it may be, and take very careful note (if necessary in a note-book) of the way in which ordinary human beings do really talk about each other. As he is a scientific enquirer with a note-book, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before. But if he will listen carefully, he will observe a certain tone taken towards friends, foes and acquaintances; a tone which is, on the whole, creditably genial and considerate, though not without strong likes and dislikes. He will hear abundant if sometimes bewildering allusion to the well-known weaknesses of Old George; but many excuses also, and a certain generous pride in conceding that Old George is quite the gentleman when drunk, or that he told the policeman off proper. Some celebrated idiot, who is always spotting winners that never win, will be treated with almost tender derision; and, especially among the poorest, there will be a true Christian pathos in the reference to those who have been “in trouble” for habits like burglary and petty larceny. And as all these queer types are called up like ghosts by the incantation of gossip, the enquirer will gradually form the impression that there is one kind of man, probably only one kind of man, perhaps, only one man, who is really disliked. The voices take on quite a different tone in speaking of him; there is a hardening and solidification of disapproval and a new coldness in the air. And this will be all the more curious because, by the current modern theories of social or anti-social action, it will not be at all easy to say why he should be such a monster; or what exactly is the matter with him. It will be hinted at only in singular figures of speech, about a gentleman who is mistakenly convinced that he owns the street; or sometimes that be owns the earth. Then one of the social critics will say, “‘E comes in ‘ere and ‘e thinks ‘e’s Gawd Almighty.” Then the scientific enquirer will shut his note-book with a snap and retire from the scene, possibly after paying for any drinks he may have consumed in the cause of social science. He has got what he wanted. He has been intellectually justified. The man in the pub has precisely repeated, word for word, the theological formula about Satan.
Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices. This is what is felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty. And we all do in fact know that the primary sin of pride has this, curiously freezing and hardening effect upon the other sins. A man may be very susceptible and in sex matters rather loose; he may waste himself on passing and unworthy passions, to the hurt of his soul; and yet always retain something which makes friendship with his own sex at least possible, and even faithful and satisfying. But once let that sort of man regard his own weakness as a strength, and you have somebody entirely different. You have the Lady-Killer; the most beastly of all possible bounders; the man whom his own sex almost always has the healthy instinct to hate and despise. A man may be naturally slothful and rather irresponsible; he may neglect many duties through carelessness, and his friends may still understand him, so long as it is really a careless carelessness. But it is the devil and all when it becomes a careful carelessness. It is the devil and all when he becomes a deliberate and self-conscious Bohemian, sponging on principle, preying on society in the name of his own genius (or rather of his own belief in his own genius) taxing the world like a king on the plea that he is a poet, and despising better men than himself who work that he may waste. It is no metaphor to say that it is the devil and all. By the same fine old original religious formula, it is all of the devil. We could go through any number of social types illustrating the same spiritual truth. It would be easy to point out that even the miser, who is half-ashamed of his madness, is a more human and sympathetic type than the millionaire who brags and boasts of his avarice and calls it sanity and simplicity and the strenuous life. It would be easy to point out that even cowardice, as a mere collapse of the nerves, is better than cowardice as an ideal and theory of the intellect; and that a really imaginative person will have more sympathy with men who, like cattle, yield to what they know is panic, than with a certain particular type of prig who preaches something that he calls peace. Men hate priggishness because it is the driest form of pride.
Thus there is a paradox in the whole position. The spiritual idea of the evil of pride, especially spiritual pride, was dismissed as a piece of mysticism not needed by modern morality, which is to be purely social and practical. And, as a fact, it is very specially needed because the morality is social and practical. On the assumption that we need care for nothing except making other human beings happy, this is quite certainly the thing that will make them unhappy. The practical case against pride, as a mere source of social discomfort and discord, is if possible even more self-evident than the more mystical case against it, as a setting up of the self against the soul of the world. And yet though we see this thing on every side in modern life, we really hear very little about it in modern literature and ethical theory. Indeed, a great deal of modern literature and ethics might be meant specially for the encouragement of spiritual pride. Scores of scribes and sages are busy writing about the importance of self-culture and self-realisation; about how every child is to be taught to develop his personality (whatever that may be); about how every man must devote himself to success, and every successful man must devote himself to developing a magnetic and compelling personality; about how every man may become a superman (by taking Our Correspondence Course) or, in the more sophisticated and artistic type of fiction, how one specially superior superman can learn to look down on the mere mob of ordinary supermen, who form the population of that peculiar world. Modern theory, as a whole, is rather encouraging egoism. But we need not be alarmed about that. Modern practice, being exactly like ancient practice, is still heartily discouraging it. The man with the strong magnetic personality is still the man whom those who know him best desire most warmly to kick out of the club. The man in a really acute stage of self-realisation is a no more pleasing object in the club than in the pub. Even the most enlightened and scientific sort of club can see through the superman; and see that he has become a bore. It is in practice that the philosophy of pride breaks down; by the test of the moral instincts of man wherever two or three are gathered together; and it is the mere experience of modern humanity that answers the modern heresy.
There is indeed another practical experience, known to us all, even more pungent and vivid than the actual unpopularity of the bully or the bumptious fool. We all know that there is a thing called egoism that is much deeper than egotism. Of all spiritual diseases it is the most intangible and the most intolerable. It is said to be allied to hysteria; it sometimes looks as if it were allied to diabolic possession. It is that condition in which the victim does a thousand varying things from one unvarying motive of a devouring vanity; and sulks or smiles, slanders or praises, conspires and intrigues or sits still and does nothing, all in one unsleeping vigilance over the social effect of one single person. It is amazing to me that in the modern world, that chatters perpetually about psychology and sociology, about the tyranny with which we are threatened by a few feeble-minded infants, about alcoholic poisoning and the treatment of neurotics, about half a hundred things that are near the subject and never on the spot— it is amazing that these moderns really have so very little to say about the cause and cure of a moral condition that poisons nearly every family and every circle of friends. There is hardly a practical psychologist who has anything to say about it that is half so illuminating as the literal exactitude of the old maxim of the priest; that pride is from hell. For there is something awfully vivid and appallingly fixed, about this madness at its worst, that makes that short and antiquated word seem much more apt than any other. And then, as I say, the learned go wandering away into discourses about drink or tobacco, about the wickedness of wine glasses or the incredible character of public-houses. The wickedest work in this world is symbolised not by a wine glass but by a looking-glass; and it is not done in public-houses;, but in the most private of all private houses which is a house of mirrors.
The phrase would probably be misunderstood; but I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves. I should tell them to enjoy dances and theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but never to learn to enjoy themselves. Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside. So long as they have this they have as the greatest minds have always declared, a something that is present in childhood and which can still preserve and invigorate manhood. The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair.
Difficulties can easily be raised, of course, in any such debate by the accident of words being used in different senses; and sometimes in quite contrary senses. For instance, when we speak of somebody being “proud of” something, as of a man being proud of his wife or a people proud of its heroes, we really mean something that is the very opposite of pride. For it implies that the man thinks that something outside himself is needed to give him great glory; and such a glory is really acknowledged as a gift. In the same way, the word will certainly be found misleading, if I say that the worst and most depressing element in the mixed elements of the present and the immediate future, seems to me to be an element of impudence. For there is a kind of impudence that we all find either amusing or bracing; as in the impudence of the guttersnipe. But there again the circumstances disarm the thing of its real evil. The quality commonly called “cheek” is not an assertion of superiority; but rather a bold attempt to balance inferiority. When you walk up to a very wealthy and powerful nobleman and playfully tip his hat over his eyes (as is your custom) you are not suggesting that you yourself are above all human follies, but rather that you are capable of them, and that he also ought to have a wider and richer experience of them. When you dig a Royal Duke in the waistcoat, in your playful manner, you are not taking yourself too seriously, but only, perhaps, not taking him so seriously as is usually thought correct. This sort of impudence may be open to criticism, as it is certainly subject to dangers. But there is a sort of hard intellectual impudence, which really treats itself as intangible to retort or judgment; and there are a certain number among the new generations and social movements, who fall into this fundamental weakness. It is a weakness; for it is simply settling down permanently to believe what even the vain and foolish can only believe by fits and starts, but what all men wish to believe and are often found weak enough to believe; that they themselves constitute the supreme standard of things. Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future. Nil admirari becomes the motto of all nihilists; and it ends, in the most complete and exact sense, in nothing.
If I had only one sermon to preach, I certainly could not end it in honour, without testifying to what is in my knowledge the salt and preservative of all these things. This is but one of a thousand things in which I have found the Catholic Church to be right, when the whole world is perpetually tending to be wrong; and without its witness, I believe that this secret, at once a sanity and a subtlety, would be almost entirely forgotten among men. I know that I for one had hardly heard of positive humility until I came within the range of Catholic influence; and even the things that I love most, such as liberty and the island poetry of England, had in this matter lost the way, and were in a fog of self-deception. Indeed there is no better example of the definition of pride than the definition of patriotism. It is the noblest of all natural affections, exactly so long as it consists of saying, “May I be worthy of England.” It is the beginning of one of the blindest forms of Pharisaism when the patriot is content to say, “I am an Englishman.” And I cannot count it an accident that the patriot has generally seen the flag as a flame of vision, beyond and better than himself, in countries of the Catholic tradition, like France and Poland and Ireland; and has hardened into this heresy of admiring merely his own breed and bone and inherited type, and himself as a part of it, in the places most remote from that religion, whether in Berlin or Belfast. In short, if I had only one sermon to preach, it would be one that would profoundly annoy the congregation, by bringing to their attention the permanent challenge of the Church. If I had only one sermon to preach, I should feel specially confident that I should not be asked to preach another.
IF DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA HAD MARRIED MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
Why is it that the world’s most famous love story, after the archetypal story of Adam and Eve, is the story of Antony and Cleopatra? I for one should answer, to begin with, because of the solid truth of the story of Adam and Eve. I have often wondered whether, when the moderns have done playing with that story, burlesquing it, and turning it upside down and tacking on a modern moral like a new tail, or expanding it into an evolutionary fantasia that nobody can make head or tail of, it will ever occur to anybody to see bow sensible it is, exactly as it stands. Even if it is an old fable, the old fable is much truer with the old moral. Christians are not constrained, and least of all Christians of my own confession, to treat Genesis with the heavy verbalism of the Puritan—the Hebraiser who knows no Hebrew. But the curious thing is that the more literally we take it the truer it is; and even if it were materialised and modernised into a story of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the old moral would still be the sound one. A man naked and with nothing of his own is given by a friend the free run of all the fruits and flowers of a very beautiful estate; and only asked to promise that he will not interfere with one particular fruit-tree. If we all talk till we are as old as Methuselah, the moral remains the same for any honourable man. If he breaks his word he is a cad; if he says, “I broke my word because I believe in breaking all limitations and expanding into infinite progress and evolution, he is ten times more of a cad; and has, moreover, become a bore as well as a bounder. But it is this modern suggestion, that Man was right to be bored with Eden and to demand evolution (otherwise mere change), that is very relevant to the question I have asked about Antony and Cleopatra. It is also very relevant to the question I am going to ask about two other famous figures in history: a woman and a man.
For upon this modern theory the Fall really was the Fall; for it was the first action that had only tedium as a motive. Progress began in boredom; and, heaven knows, it sometimes seems likely to end in it. And no wonder; for of all utter falsehoods the most false, I think, is this notion that men can be happy in movement, when nothing but dullness drives them on from behind. Children, and such happy people, can go on from something they really like to something they will like more. But if ever there was a whisper that might truly come from the devil, it is the suggestion that men can despise the beautiful things they have got, and only delight in getting new things because they have not got them. It is obvious that, on that principle, Adam will tire of the tree just as he has tired of the garden. “It is enough that there is always a beyond”; that is, there is always something else to get tired of. All progress based on that mood is truly a Fall; man did fall, does fall, and we can today see him falling. It is the great progressive proposition; that he must seek only for enjoyment because he has lost the power to enjoy.
Now this shadow of failure on all fame and civilisation which the agnostic poet preferred to call “the something that infects the world,” and I shall cause general pain by calling Original Sin, does manifest itself markedly in the sort of historical legends that exist. But I would urge here that it appears in the historical legends that do not exist. I refer especially to that grand historical episode of the heroic honeymoon, otherwise called the marriage of pure minds, which I study here as closely as is possible in a case that does not exist. It is a remarkable fact, when we consider how much happiness love has doubtless given to mankind as a whole, that mankind has never pointed to any great historical example of a hero and a heroine wedded in a way entirely worthy of them; of a great man and a great woman united by a great love that was entirely supreme and satisfying, as in the tradition of the gigantic loves of Eden. Anybody who imagines that I am talking pessimism, about ordinary people in love, will impute to me the very reverse of what I mean. Millions of people have been happy in love and marriage, in the ordinary way of human happiness; but then that precisely consists in a certain commonsense admission of original sin; in humility and pardon and taking things as they come. But there has not been any example on the grand scale, of a perfect marriage—that has remained in human memory like a great monument. All those monuments, though often of the purest marble, hewn from the loftiest mountain, have very clearly across them the crack from the earthquake in the beginning. The noblest knight of the Middle Ages, St. Louis, was less happy in his marriage than in all other relations. Dante did not marry Beatrice; he lost his love in infancy and found her again in Paradise or in a dream. Nelson was a great lover, but we cannot say that his love made him more great, since it made him do in Naples the only mean action of his life. These historic examples have become legends or traditions; but they have become tragic traditions. And the central literary tradition of all is that typically tragic one I have named, in which even perfect love was whimsically imperfect, and certainly suffered by very imperfect people; in which the hero learned no lesson except delay; in which the heroine inspired nothing except defeat; in which romance made him less than a Caesar and has unkindly compared her to a snake; in which the man was weakened by love and the woman by lovers. Men have taken Antony and Cleopatra as the perfect love story, precisely because it is the imperfect love story. It mirrors the thwarting, the unworthiness, the disproportion which they have felt as spoiling so many splendid passions and divine desires; and mirrors them all the more truly because the mirror is cracked. I imagine that poets will never leave off writing about Antony and Cleopatra; and all they write will be in the mood of that great French poet of our own time, who describes the Roman warrior gazing into the unfathomable eyes of the Egyptian queen, and seeing beneath a spinning and sparkling light the eddies of a vast sea, filled with the rout of all his ships.
I have here dared to call up out of the dust another warrior, whose destiny turned also with the topsails and high poops of the galleys; and another woman, whose legend also has been sometimes twisted into the legend of a snake. There was never any doubt about the beautiful colours or graceful curves of the snake; but, in fact, the woman was not a snake, but very much of a woman; even by the account of those who call her a wicked woman. And the man was not only a warrior, but a conqueror; and his great ships sweep through history not merely to defeat, but to a high deliverance, in which he did not lose the empire, but saved the world. Whatever else we may think of the woman, none can doubt where her heart would have been in that battle, or what sort of song of praise she would have sent up after that victory. There was much about her that was militant, though her life might well have sickened her of militancy; there was much about him that was sensitive and sympathetic with that wider world of culture for which her soul sickened till she died. They were made for each other; they were in fact the heroic lovers, or perfect human pair, for whom we have looked elsewhere in history in vain. There was only one small defect in their purple and impassioned love story; and that is that they never met.
In truth, this dream began to drift through my mind when I first read a parenthetical remark by Andrew Lang, in a historical study about Philip of Spain. Referring to the King’s half-brother, the famous Don John of Austria, Lang remarked casually: “He intended to carry off Mary Queen of Scots,” and added caustically: “He was incapable of fear.” Of course nobody is incapable of fear. He was certainly, in the common sense, incapable of obeying fear: but, if I understand the type, he was not incapable of enjoying fear as an element in a mystery like that of love. It is exactly because love has lost that slight touch of fear, that it has become in our time so flat and flippant and vulgar; when it has not become laboriously biological, not to say bestial. And Mary was dangerous as well as in danger; that heart-shaped face looking out of the ruff in so many pictures was like a magnet, a talisman, a terrible jewel. There was, even then, in the idea of eloping with the tragic yet attractive Franco-Scottish princess, all the ancient savour of the romances about delivering a lady from dragons, or even disenchanting her out of the shape of a dragon. But though the idea was romantic, it was also in a sense what is now called psychological; for it exactly answered the personal needs of two very extraordinary personalities.
If ever there was a man who ought to have rounded off his victorious career by capturing something more human and spiritual and satisfying than wreaths of laurel or flags of defeated foes, it was Don John of Austria. Because his actual historical life rises on a wave of conquest in relation to these things, and then sinks again into something less epical and simple, his life has something of the appearance of an anti-climax; and reads like a mere stale maxim that all victories are vanities. He tried to crown his chief exploit by founding a kingdom of his own, and was prevented by the jealousy of his brother; he then went, somewhat wearily, I imagine, as the representative of the same brother to the Flemish fields laid waste by the wars of the Dutch and the Duke of Alva. He set out to be more merciful and magnanimous than the Duke of Alva; but he died in a net or tangle of policies; of which the only touch of poetry was a suggestion of poison.
But in that broad and golden dawn of the Renaissance, full of classical legends, carrying off Mary Stuart would have been like carrying off Helen of Troy. In that red sunset of the old chivalric romance (for the sunrise and the sunset were both in that bewildering sky) it would have seemed a magnificent materialisation of one of those strange and stately public love affairs, or knightly services, which preserved something of the Courts of Love and the pageant of the Troubadours; as when Rudel publicly pledged himself to an unknown lady in a castle in the east, almost as distant as a castle east of the sun; or the sword of Bayard sent across the mountains its remote salute to Lucretia. That one of these great loves of the great should actually be achieved in the grand style, that, I fancy, would have been a wildly popular episode in that epoch. And to the career of Don John it would have given a climax and a clue of meaning which its merely military successes could not give; and handed his name down in history and (what is much more important) in legend and literature, as a happier Antony married to a nobler Cleopatra. And when he looked into her eyes he would not have seen only bright chaos and the catastrophe of Actium, the ruin of his ships and his hopes of an imperial throne; but rather the flying curve and crescent of the Christian ships, sweeping to the rescue of the Christian captives, and blazed upon their golden sails the sunburst of Lepanto.
The converse is also true. If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she. The tragedy of her life was not that she was abnormal, but that she was normal. It was the crowd all round her that was abnormal. There is almost a sort of antic allegory, in that sense, in such accidents as the fact that Rizzio had a hump and Bothwell some sort of a squint. If her story seems now to be steeped in morbidity, it was because the mob was morbid. Unfortunately for this ill-fated queen, she was not morbid. It is the other characters, each in his own way, which pass before us in misshapen outlines like the dwarfs and lunatics in some tropic tragedy of Ford or Webster, dancing round a deserted queen. And, by a final touch, all these ungainly figures seem more tolerable than the one that is externally elegant, the hollow doll, Darnley; just as a handsome waxwork can seem more uncanny than an ugly man. In that sense she had seen handsome men and ugly men and strong men and clever men; but they were all half-men; like the hideous cripples imagined by Flaubert, living in their half-houses with their half-wives and half-children. She never met a complete man; and Don John was very complete. In that sense she had been given many things; the crown of Scotland, the prospect of the crown of France; the prospect of the crown of England. She had been given everything except fresh air and the sunlight treatment; and all that is typified by the great ships with their golden castles and their leaping flags, that go forth to meet the winds of the world.
We know why Mary Stuart was killed. She was not killed for having killed her husband, even if she had killed her husband; and recent study of the Casket Letters suggests that her enemies are more clearly convicted of forgery than she was ever convicted of murder. She was not killed for trying to kill Elizabeth, even if the whole story of trying to kill Elizabeth was not a fiction employed by those who were trying to kill Mary. She was not killed for being beautiful; that is one of the many popular slanders on poor Elizabeth. She was killed for being in good health. Perhaps she was the only person who was ever condemned and executed merely for being in good health. The legend which represented Elizabeth as a lioness and Mary as a sort of sickly snake is largely abandoned; anyhow, it is the very reverse of the fact. Mary was very vigorous; a strong rider, and as a dancer almost ready to outrun the Modern Girl. Curiously enough, her contemporary portraits do not convey much of her charm, but do convey a great deal of her vigour. But, as anyone may have noticed in the animal spirits of some of the finest actresses, vigour has sometimes a great deal to do with charm. Now it was essential to the policy of Cecil, and the oligarchs rich with the loot of the old religion, that Mary should die for Elizabeth, and Mary, despite her misfortunes, did not show the smallest disposition to die. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still dying rather than still living. And when the Catholic heir inherited, it might go ill with the Protestant lords. They therefore applied to Mary, at Fotheringay, one of the sharpest possible remedies for good health, which has seldom been known to fail.
Her energy, which had thus brought her to her death, had also brought her through her life; and may be the key to many of the riddles of her life. It may be that her repeated ill-luck in marriage embittered her more than it might a woman less normal and elemental; and that the very levities, which led to her being painted as a harlot or a vampire, sprang from her primary fitness to be a mother and a wife. It may be (for all I know) that a fairly healthy person, in such a horrible experience, might have wasted her natural instincts on some violent adventurer like Bothwell; those things are always possible; but I confess I could never see that in this case they were necessary. I have often fancied that the alliance may have been more politic, and even cynical, than appeared to that fine romantic novelist, the forger of the Casket Letters. Or it might have been surrender to a sort of blackmail; it might have been many things. Anyhow, being surrounded by brutes, she chose the best brute; though he is always represented as the worst. He was the only one of them who was a man as well as a brute; and a Scotsman as well as a man. He at least never betrayed her to Elizabeth; and all the others did nothing else. He kept the borders of her kingdom against the English like a good subject and a normal soldier; and she might very well have thrown herself under his protection for that alone. But whether or no she sought satisfaction in such a marriage, I am sure that she never found satisfaction in it; I am sure she found only a new phase of the long degradation of living with her inferiors.
There was always in her heart a hunger for civilisation. It is an appetite not easily appreciated now, when people are so over-civilised that they can only have a hunger for barbarism. But she loved culture as the Italian artists of the previous century had loved it; as something not only beautiful but bright and shining and new; like Leonardo’s first sketches of flying-machines or the full revelations of perspective and light. She was the Renaissance chained up like a prisoner; just as Don John was the Renaissance roaming the world like a pirate. This was, of course, the perfectly simple explanation of her frequent and friendly toleration of a hunchback like Rizzio and a young lunatic like Chastelard. They were Italy and France; they were music and letters; they were singing-birds from the South who had happened to perch on her window-sill. If there are still any historians who suppose that they were anything more to her than that, especially in the case of the Italian secretary, I can only say that such learned old gentlemen must be pretty much on the moral and mental level of Darnley and his company of cut-throats. Even if she was a wicked woman, there is no sense in supposing that she was not an intelligent woman, or that she never wished to turn from her laborious and life-long wickedness for a little intelligent conversation. The apology for my own (somewhat belated) experiment in matchmaking is that she might have been very different, when married to a man who was quite as brave as Bothwell and quite as intelligent as Rizzio, and, in a more practical and useful fashion, at least as romantic as Chastelard.
But we must not be romantic; that is, we must not concern ourselves with the real feelings of real and recognisable human beings. It is not allowed. We must now sternly turn our attention to scientific history; that is, to certain abstractions which have been labelled The Elizabethan Settlement, the Union, the Reformation, and the Modern World. I will leave the Romantics, those unpresentable Bohemians (with whom, of course, I would not be seen for worlds), to decide at what date and crisis they would like Don John finally to fulfil his design; whether his shining ship is to appear in the wide waters of the Forth as the mad mob in Edinburgh is waving scurrilous scrolls and banners before the window of the Queen; or, on the contrary, a dark boat with a solitary figure is to slide across the glassy stillness of Loch Leven; or a courier hot with haste in advance of a new army hurl a new challenge into the bickering parleys of Carberry, or a herald emblazoned with God knows what eagles and castles and lions (and presumably a bar sinister) blow a trumpet before the barred portals of Fotheringay. I leave that to them; they know all about it. I am an earnest and plodding student of the dry scientific details of history; and we really must consider the possible effect on such details as England, Scotland, Spain, Europe, and the world. We must suppose, for the sake of argument, that Don John was at least sufficiently strong to assert Mary’s claim to sovereignty in Scotland to begin with; and, despite the unpleasant moralising of the mob in Edinburgh, I think such a restoration would have been generally successful in Scotland. Professor Phillimore used to say that the tragedy of Scotland was that she had the Reformation without the Renaissance. And I certainly think that, while Mary and the southern prince were discussing Plato and Pico della Mirandola, John Knox would have found himself a little out of his depth. But on the assumption of popular rulers and a strong Spanish backing, which is the essence of this fantasy, I should say that a people like the Scots would have gobbled up the strong meat of the Revival of Learning quicker than anybody else. But in any case, there is another point to be considered. If the Scots did not figure prominently in the Renaissance, they had, in their own way, figured most brilliantly in the Middle Ages. Glasgow was one of the oldest universities; Bruce was counted the fourth knight in Christendom; and Scotland, not England, continued the tradition of Chaucer. The chivalrous side of the regime would surely have awakened noble memories, even in that ignoble squabble. I must here unfortunately omit a very fine chapter from the unpublished Romance, in which the lovers ride down to Melrose (if necessary by moonlight) to the reputed resting-place of the Heart of Bruce; and recall (in ringing phrases) how Spanish and Scottish spears had once charged side by side upon the Saracen, and hurled far ahead, like a bolt above the battle, the heart of a Scottish King. This fine piece of prose must not delay us, however, from facing the next fact; which is that Mary, once safe, would survive as the Queen of England as well as Scotland. It is enough to say that medieval memories might have awakened in the North; and the Scots might even have remembered the meaning of Holyrood.
Don John died trying to keep his temper with Dutch Calvinists, about ten years before the affair of the Armada; and, much as I admire him, I am glad he did. I do not want my individual dream or romance, about the rescue and elopement of Mary Stuart, mixed up with that famous international collision, in which as an Englishman I am bound to sympathise with England and as an Anti-Imperialist with the smaller nation. But, it may be said, how can an Englishman in any case reconcile himself to a romance that would involve the Elizabethan policy being overthrown by a Spanish prince, the throne occupied by a Scottish queen; or some part at least of the Armada’s purposes achieved? To which I answer that such a question recoils ruinously on those who ask it. Let them merely compare what might have happened with what did happen. Was Mary a Scot? We endured one in her son. Was Don John a foreigner? We submitted to one when we expelled the grandson of her son. Mary was as English as James the First. Don John was as English as George the First. The fact is that, whatever else our policy of insular religion (or whatever we call it) may have done, it certainly did not save us from alien immigration, or even from alien invasion. Some may say we could not accept a Spaniard, when we had been recently fighting the Spaniards. But, when we did accept a Dutch prince, we had been recently fighting the Dutch. Blake as well as Drake might complain that his victories had been reversed; and that we had, after all, allowed the broom of Van Tromp to sweep not only the English seas, but the English land. A whole generation before the first George came from Hanover, William of Orange had marched across England with an invading army from Holland. If Don John had really brought an Armada with him (and Armadas are often awkward during elopements) he could hardly have inflicted a heavier humiliation on us than that. But, of course, the truth is that I am sensitive on the point of patriotism; much more sensitive than anybody was in those days. Extreme nationalism is a relatively new religion; and what these people were thinking of was the old sort of religion. It really made a great difference to them that Dutch William was a Calvinist while Don John was a Catholic; and that whatever George the First was (and he was nearly nothing) he was not a Papist. That brings me to a much more vital phase of my vision of what never happened. But those who expect me to break forth into thunders of theological anathema, will here be rather abruptly disappointed. I have no intention, I have no need, to argue here about Luther and Leo and the rights and wrongs of the revolt of new sects in the North. I need not do so, for the simple reason that I do not believe, in the case here imagined, that we should have been primarily concerned about the North. I believe we should have realised instead the enormously important position in the South; and even more so in the East. All eyes would have been turned to a far more central battle of civilisation; and the hero of that battle was Don John of Austria.
It has been remarked, and not untruly, that the Papacy seemed curiously negligent of the northern danger from Protestantism. It was; but chiefly because it was not at all negligent of the eastern danger from Islam. Throughout all that period Pope after Pope issued appeal after appeal to the princes of Europe to combine in defence of all Christendom against the Asiatic attack. They had hardly any response; and only a scratch fleet of their own galleys with some Venetian, Genoese, and others, could be sent to stop the Turk from sweeping the whole Mediterranean. This is the huge historic fact which the northern doctrinal quarrels have concealed; and that is why I am not concerned here with the northern doctrinal quarrels. That age was not the age of the Reformation. It was the age of the last great Asiatic invasion, which very nearly destroyed Europe. About the time the Reformation was beginning, the Turks, in the very middle of Europe, destroyed at a blow the ancient kingdom of Bohemia. About the time the Reformation had finished its work, the hordes out of Asia were besieging Vienna. They were foiled by the stroke of Sobieski the Pole, as a hundred years before by the stroke of Don John of Austria. But they came as near as that to submerging the cities of Europe. It must also be remembered that this last Moslem thrust was really a savage and incalculable thing, compared with the first thrust of Saladin and the Saracens. The high Arab culture of the Crusades had long perished; and the invaders were Tartars and Turks and a rabble from really barbarous lands. It was not the Moors but the Huns. It was not Saladin against Richard or Averroes against Aquinas; it was something much more like the worst and wildest shocker about the Yellow Peril.
I have a great respect for the real virtues and the sane if sleeping virility of Islam. I like that element in it that is at once democratic and dignified; I sympathise with many elements in it which most Europeans (and all Americans) would call lazy and unprogressive. But when all allowance has been made for these moral merits, of the simpler sort, I defy anybody with a sense of cultural comparison to tolerate the image of Europe of the Renaissance given up to Bashi-Bazouks and the wild Mongol mobs of the decline. But it is almost as bad if we consider only the vetoes of primitive Islam; and most of its virtues were vetoes. When all is said, to the eyes of Mediterranean men especially, there passed across their shining sea merely the shadow of a great Destroyer. What they heard was the voice of Azrael rather than Allah. Theirs was the vision that would have been the background of my dream; and lifted all its nobler figures, English, Spanish, or Scottish, into the altitudes of defiance and martyrdom. The dry wind that drove before it a dust of broken idols was threatening the poised statues of Angelo and Donatello, where they shine on the high places around the central sea; and the sand of the high deserts descended, like moving mountains of dust and thirst and death, on the deep culture of the sacred vines; and the songs and the deep laughter of the vineyards. And above all, those clouds that were closing round them were like the curtains of the harem, from whose corners look out the stony faces of the eunuchs; there spread like a vast shadow over shining courts and closing spaces the silence of the East, and all its dumb compromise with the coarseness of man. These things, above all, were closing in upon that high and thwarted romance of the perfect Knight and Lady, which men of the Christian blood can never attain and never abandon; but which these two alone, perhaps, might have attained and made one flesh.
Historians quarrel about whether the English under Elizabeth preferred the Prayer-Book or the Mass-Book. But surely nobody will quarrel about whether they preferred the Crescent or the Cross. The learned dispute about how England was divided into Catholics and Protestants. But nobody will dispute what England would have felt, when told that the whole world was now desperately divided into Christians and Mohammedans. In short, I think that under this influence England would have simply broadened her mind; even if it were only broadened to take in a big battle instead of a small battle. Of that broader battle, and our best chances in it, Don John of Austria was universally regarded as the incarnation and the uplifted sign. Not only the praise due to heroes, but the flattery inevitably paid to princes, would have carried that triumph before him wherever he went like a noise of trumpets. Everybody would have felt in him both the Renaissance and the Crusade; as those two things are warp and woof in the golden tapestries of Ariosto. Everybody would have felt both the rebirth of Europe and its all-but death. Nor need the praise have come merely from any common flatterers. All good Englishmen could have become good Europeans; I should express my meaning better if I said great Europeans. In all that crowd, perhaps, only Shakespeare could not have been greater. And yet I am not so sure; for he might certainly have been gayer. Whatever his politics were (and I suspect they were much like those of his friend the Catholic Southampton) there is no doubt that his tragedies are eternally twisted and tortured with something like an obsession about usurpation and slain kings and stolen crowns; and all the insecurity of royal and every other right. Nobody knows how his heart, if not his mind, might have expanded in that truly “glorious summer” of a sovereignty which satisfied his sixteenth-century hunger for a heroic and high-hearted sovereign. He at least would not have been indifferent to the significance of the great triumph in the Mediterranean. Supporters of the extreme spiritual insularity have often quoted the great lines in which Shakespeare praised England, as something separate and cut-off by the sea. They rather tend to forget what he really praised her for.
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.
I really think that the man who wrote those lines would have welcomed the victor of Lepanto almost as warmly as he must have welcomed a Scotch Calvinist who was frightened of a drawn dirk.
About Mary I imagine there would have been no difficulty at all. Mary was the perfectly legitimate heir to the throne of England, which is more than can be said for Elizabeth. The general sense of loyalty to the legitimate sovereign, which was enormously strong in England, would have flowed towards her more freely than towards Elizabeth; because she was a more popular and approachable sort of person. She who had so often, and perhaps too often, kindled love even in the very house of hatred, might surely have been loved sufficiently in a happier household of love enthroned; as in the glowing palace of René of Provence. I see no difficulty about her popularity; but even her husband, whether he were called Consort or King, might surely, to say the least of it, have been as popular as any other king-consort. I will not say he would be more popular than William of Orange; for he could not be less. But the English can be polite to foreigners, even foreign consorts. Tennyson, as Poet Laureate, was struck by the resemblance between Prince Albert and an ideal knight of the Round Table. Ben Jonson, as Poet Laureate, would not have to stretch politeness quite so far, in order to compare Don John to an Arthurian knight. At least nobody could say he was a carpet-knight. But, what is much more important, Britain would have been in another and more real sense back in Arthurian times. It would be defending the whole tradition of Roman culture and Christian morals against heathens and barbarians from the ends of the earth. If that had been fully realised, do you think anyone would have gone about asking whether a good Calvinist ought to be a Supralapsarian or a Sublapsarian? It would no longer be a provincial question of whether some Puritan trooper had knocked the nose off a stone saint in Salisbury Cathedral; it would be a question of whether some dervish out of the desert should dance among the shattered fragments of the Moses of Michelangelo. All normal Christians, if they had understood the peril, would have closed up in defence of Christendom. And England would have got glory in the battle, as she did when that ship with crimson sails carried the English leopards to the storming of Acre.
It might, I fear, have meant a certain amount of hostility to France: the rival of the Spanish-Austrian combination; though even here there are reconciling influences and Mary’s sympathies would always have been with the country of her youth and her most famous poem. But, anyhow, it would not have been like the hostility to France, or rather blind hatred of France, which we did inherit from the victory of the Whigs. It would have been more like the medieval wars with the French, waged by men who were half French themselves. The English conquests in France were a sort of eddy and backwash of the original French conquest in England; the whole business was almost a civil war. For there was more internationalism in medieval war than there is in modern peace. The same was true of the actual wars which did break out between France and Spain; they did not break the inner unity of the Latin culture. Louis the Fourteenth was guilty of a slight exaggeration in saying that the mountains called the Pyrenees have entirely disappeared from the landscape. Many careful tourists have verified their existence and reported the royal error. But there was this truth in it; that the Pyrenees were in every sense a natural division. The Straits of Dover soon became a very unnatural division. They became a spiritual abyss, not between different patron saints but between different gods; perhaps between different universes. The men who fought at Crecy and Agincourt had the same religion— to disregard. But the men who fought at Blenheim and at Waterloo had this entirely novel feature—that the English had an equal hatred for French religion and for French irreligion. They could not understand the ideals of either side in the great civil war of all civilisation. The limitation was really rather like the Straits of Dover, being both narrow and bleak and dangerous enough to be decisive; bitter as the sea and aptly symbolised by sea-sickness. Perhaps, after all, there was a point in the tale told in our nursery histories— that it was the last Catholic queen who felt the loss of the last French possession, and had “Calais” written on her heart. With her died, perhaps, the last of that spirit which had somewhere in its depths a spiritual Channel Tunnel.
But this linking up of Europe in the Renaissance would have made easier and not harder the linking up of Europe in the Revolution; in the sense of the general Reform that was really rational and necessary in the eighteenth century. It would have been larger and clearer in its tests and ideals, if it had not been anticipated by a mere triumph of the richest aristocrats over the English crown. If England had not become entirely a country of squires, it might have become, like Spain, a country of peasants; or at any rate remained a country of yeomen. It might have stood the siege of commercial exploitation and commercial decline, of mere employment followed by mere unemployment. It might have learned the meaning of equality as well as liberty. I know at least one Englishman who wishes to-day that he were as hopeful about the immediate future of England as about the immediate future of Spain. But in my vision they might have learned from each other and produced, among other things, one prodigious consequence; America would be a very different place.
There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallised anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a Christendom that was entirely Christian. There was a moment when Humanism had the road straight before it; but, what is even more important, the road also straight behind it. It might have been a real progress, not losing anything of what was good in the past. The significance of two people like Mary Stuart and Don John of Austria is that in them Religion and the Renaissance had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new conquests and discoveries to their sons. They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth-century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the whole Church. There was a moment when religion could have digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers; as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the central Christian tradition. What darkened that dawn was the dust and smoke from the struggles of the dogmatising sectaries in Scotland, in Holland, and eventually in England. But for that, on the Continent, the heresy of Jansenism had never so much over-shadowed the splendour of the Counter-Reformation. And England would have gone the way of Shakespeare rather than the way of Milton; which latter degenerated rapidly into the way of Muggleton.
There is perhaps, therefore, something more than a fancy, certainly something more than an accident, in this connection between the two romantic figures and the great turning-point of history. They might really have turned it to the right rather than the left; or at least prevented it from turning too far to the left. The point about Don John of Austria is that, like Bayard and a few others in that transition, he was unmistakably the original medieval knight, with the wider accomplishments and ambitions of the Renaissance added to him. But if we look at some of his contemporaries, as for instance, at Cecil, we see an entirely new type, in which there is no such combination or tradition. A man like Cecil is not chivalrous, does not want to be chivalrous, and (what is most important of all) does not pretend to be chivalrous. Of course there was sham chivalry, as there is a sham of everything; and mean and treacherous medieval men made a false parade of it with pageants and heraldry. But a mean man like Cecil did not make any parade of it, or any pretence of it. So far as he knew or cared, it had gone clean out of the world. Yet in fact it had not gone; and a great rally of it among his foes would still have commanded the natural loyalty of Europeans. That is what makes this story so strange; that the forces were there for the deliverance. The Romance of the North could really have replied to the Romance of the South, the rose crying to the laurel; and she who had changed songs with Ronsard, and he who had fought side by side with Cervantes, might truly have met by the very tide and current of their time. It was as if a great wind had turned northward, bearing a gallant ship; and far away in the North a lady opened her lattice upon the sea.
It never happened. It was too natural to happen. I had almost said it was too inevitable to happen. Anyhow, there was nothing natural, let alone inevitable, about what did happen. Now and again Shakespeare, with a horror almost bordering on hysteria, will thrust into the limelight some clown or idiot, to suggest, against the black curtain of tragedy, this incongruity and inconsequence in the things that really do happen. The dark curtains open and there comes forth something; certainly not the Lion of Lepanto clad in gold, nor the Heart of Holyrood, the queen of the poets, who called up the songs of Ronsard and Chastelard; but something quite different and doubtless a sort of comic relief: Jacobus Rex, the grotesque king; clumsy, querulous, padded like an armchair; pedantic; perverted. He had been brought up carefully by the elders of the True Kirk, and he did them credit; piously explaining that he could not bring himself to save his mother’s life because of the superstition to which she was attached. He was a good Puritan; a typical Prohibitionist; intolerant of tobacco; more tolerant of torture and murder and things yet more unnatural. For though he shook with terror at the very shape of the shining sword, he had no difficulty about consigning Fawkes to the rack, and when death had merely been attained by the art of poisoning, he was ready with a pardon, as he cowered under the threats of Carr. What things lay behind those threats and that pardon there is here, I am glad to say, no need to inquire; but the stink of that court, as it reaches us through the purlieus of the Overbury Murder, is such as to make us turn for fresh air. I will not say to the ideal loves of Mary and Don John of Austria, which I have merely imagined, but to the very worst version of the bloody loves of Mary and Bothwell which their most furious enemies have denounced. Compared with all that, loving Bothwell would be as innocent as plucking a rose, and killing Darnley as natural as pulling up a weed.
And so, after that one wild glimpse of the possibility of the impossible, we sink back at the best into a series of third-rate things. Charles the First was better, a man sad and proud, but good so far as a man can be good without being good-humoured. Charles the Second was good-humoured without being good; but the worst of him was that his life was a long surrender; James the Second had his grandfather’s virtues, so far as they went, and was therefore betrayed and broken. Then came William the Dutchman, with whom there again enters the savour of something sinister and alien. I would not suggest that such Calvinists were Antinomian Calvinists; but there is something strange in the thought that twice, in that time, there entered with that unnatural logic the rumour and savour of unnatural desire. But by the time we come to Anne and the first featureless George, it is no longer the King that counts. Merchant princes have superseded all other princes; England is committed to mere commerce and the capitalist development; and we see successively established the National Debt, the Bank of England, Wood’s Halfpence, the South Sea Bubble, and all the typical institutions of Business Government. I will not discuss here whether the modern sequel, with its cosmopolitan trusts, its complicated and practically secret financial control, its march of machinery and its effacement of private property and personal liberty, be on the whole good or bad. I will only express an intuition that, even if it is very good, something else might have been better. I need not deny that in certain respects the world has progressed in order and philanthropy; I need only state my suspicion that the world might have progressed much quicker. And I think that the northern countries, especially, would have progressed much quicker, if the philanthropy had been from the first guided by a larger philosophy, like that of Bellarmine and More; if it had drawn directly from the Renaissance and not been deflected and delayed by the sulky sectarianism of the seventeenth century. But in any case the great moral institutions of modern times, the Straddle, the Wheat Corner, the Merger, and the rest will not be affected by my little literary fancy; and I need feel no responsibility if I waste some hours of my inefficient existence in dreaming of the things that might have been (which the determinists will tell me could never have been) and in weaving this faded chaplet for the prince of heroes and the queen of hearts.
Perhaps there are things that are too great to happen, and too big to pass through the narrow doors of birth. For this world is too small for the soul of man; and, since the end of Eden, the very sky is not large enough for lovers.
ON READING
The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone. The way in which it does this, however, is sufficiently curious to be worth our fully understanding it to begin with.
From time to time in human history, but especially in restless epochs like our own, a certain class of things appears. In the old world they were called heresies. In the modern world they are called fads. Sometimes they are for a time useful; sometimes they are wholly mischievous. But they always consist of undue concentration upon some one truth or half-truth. Thus it is true to insist upon God’s knowledge, but heretical to insist on it as Calvin did at the expense of his Love; thus it is true to desire a simple life, but heretical to desire it at the expense of good feeling and good manners. The heretic (who is also the fanatic) is not a man who loves truth too much; no man can love truth too much. The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself. He prefers the half-truth that he has found to the whole truth which humanity has found. He does not like to see his own precious little paradox merely bound up with twenty truisms into the bundle of the wisdom of the world.
Sometimes such innovators are of a sombre sincerity like Tolstoi, sometimes of a sensitive and feminine eloquence like Nietzsche, and sometimes of an admirable humour, pluck, and public spirit like Mr. Bernard Shaw. In all cases they make a stir, and perhaps found a school. But in all cases the same fundamental mistake is made. It is always supposed that the man in question has discovered a new idea. But, as a fact, what is new is not the idea, but only the isolation of the idea. The idea itself can be found, in all probability, scattered frequently enough through all the great books of a more classic or impartial temper, from Homer and Virgil to Fielding and Dickens. You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.
In case this point is not clear, I will take two examples, both in reference to notions fashionable among some of the more fanciful and younger theorists. Nietzsche, as every one knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea. It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past, say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads. Turn up the last act of Shakespeare’s Richard III and you will find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines, but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche. Richard Crookback says to his nobles:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
As I have said, the fact is plain. Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick; a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them. They thought of them; only they did not think much of them. It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea; he saw it, and he saw through it.
I will take one other example: Mr. Bernard Shaw in his striking and sincere play called “Major Barbara”, throws down one of the most violent of his verbal challenges to proverbial morality. People say, “Poverty is no crime.” “Yes,” says Mr. Bernard Shaw, “poverty is a crime, and the mother of crimes. It is a crime to be poor if you could possibly rebel or grow rich. To be poor means to be poor-spirited, servile or tricky.” Mr. Shaw shows signs of an intention to concentrate on this doctrine, and many of his followers do the same. Now, it is only the concentration that is new, not the doctrine. Thackeray makes Becky Sharp say that it is easy to be moral on £1,000 a year, and so difficult on £100. But, as in the case of Shakespeare I have quoted, the point is not merely that Thackeray knew of this conception, but that he knew exactly what it was worth. It not only occurred to him, but he knew where it ought to occur. It ought to occur in the conversation of Becky Sharp; a woman shrewd and not without sincerity, but profoundly unacquainted with all the deeper emotions which make life worth living. The cynicism of Becky, with Lady Jane and Dobbin to balance it, has a certain breezy truth. The cynicism of Mr. Shaw’s Undershaft, preached alone with the austerity of a field preacher, is simply not true at all. It is simply not true at all to say that the very poor are as a whole more insincere or more grovelling than the very rich. Becky’s half-truth has become first a crotchet, then a creed, and then a lie. In the case of Thackeray, as in that of Shakespeare, the conclusion which concerns us is the same. What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas. It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare’s head; it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock the nonsense out of it.
DELLA LETTURA
L’uso più alto dei grandi maestri della letteratura non è affatto letterario; sta al di là del loro stile sublime e persino della loro ispirazione emotiva. Il primo servigio della buona letteratura è che impedisce all’uomo di essere semplicemente moderno. Essere semplicemente moderni significa condannarsi a un’ultima angustia; proprio come spendere il proprio ultimo denaro terreno nel cappello più nuovo significa condannarsi a essere fuori moda. La strada dei secoli antichi è disseminata di moderni defunti. La letteratura, la letteratura classica e duratura, compie la sua opera migliore ricordandoci di continuo l’intero giro della verità e bilanciando le idee altrui e più vetuste contro le idee alle quali potremmo per un istante inclinare. Il modo in cui essa fa questo, tuttavia, è abbastanza curioso da meritare che, per cominciare, lo comprendiamo appieno.
Di tempo in tempo nella storia umana, ma specialmente in epoche irrequiete come la nostra, compare una certa specie di cose. Nel mondo antico si chiamavano eresie. Nel mondo moderno si chiamano mode. Talvolta per un tempo sono utili; talvolta sono del tutto malefiche. Ma consistono sempre in una concentrazione eccessiva su qualche singola verità o mezza verità. Così è vero che si debba insistere sulla scienza di Dio, ma è eretico insistervi come fece Calvino, a scapito del suo Amore; così è vero che si possa desiderare una vita semplice, ma è eretico desiderarla a scapito del buon sentire e delle buone maniere. L’eretico (che è anche il fanatico) non è un uomo che ami troppo la verità; nessun uomo può amare troppo la verità. L’eretico è un uomo che ama la propria verità più della verità stessa. Preferisce la mezza verità che ha trovato all’intera verità che l’umanità ha trovato. Non gli piace vedere il suo prezioso piccolo paradosso semplicemente legato insieme a venti luoghi comuni nel fascio della saggezza del mondo.
Talvolta questi innovatori sono di una tetra sincerità come Tolstoj, talvolta di un’eloquenza sensibile e femminea come Nietzsche, e talvolta di un ammirevole umorismo, coraggio e spirito civico come il signor Bernard Shaw. In tutti i casi fanno scalpore, e forse fondano una scuola. Ma in tutti i casi si commette il medesimo errore fondamentale. Si suppone sempre che l’uomo in questione abbia scoperto un’idea nuova. Ma, di fatto, ciò che è nuovo non è l’idea, bensì soltanto l’isolamento dell’idea. L’idea stessa può essere trovata, con ogni probabilità, sparsa abbastanza di frequente per tutti i grandi libri di tempra più classica o imparziale, da Omero e Virgilio fino a Fielding e Dickens. Nei vecchi libri potete trovare tutte le idee nuove; solo che là le troverete bilanciate, tenute al loro posto, e talora contraddette e vinte da idee altrui e migliori. I grandi scrittori non trascurarono una moda perché non vi avessero pensato, ma perché vi avevano pensato, e avevano pensato anche a tutte le risposte da opporle, per giunta.
Nel caso questo punto non fosse chiaro, prenderò due esempi, entrambi in riferimento a nozioni di moda tra alcuni dei teorici più fantasiosi e più giovani. Nietzsche, come ognuno sa, predicò una dottrina che egli e i suoi seguaci considerano a quanto pare molto rivoluzionaria; sosteneva che l’ordinaria morale altruistica fosse stata l’invenzione di una classe di schiavi per impedire l’emergere di tipi superiori che li combattessero e li governassero. Ora, i moderni, siano essi d’accordo con ciò o no, ne parlano sempre come di un’idea nuova e inaudita. Si suppone con calma e con ostinazione che i grandi scrittori del passato, poniamo Shakespeare per esempio, non abbiano condiviso questa veduta, perché non l’avevano mai immaginata; perché non era mai passata loro per la testa. Aprite l’ultimo atto del Richard III di Shakespeare e troverete non solo tutto ciò che Nietzsche aveva da dire condensato in due versi, ma lo troverete espresso con le parole stesse di Nietzsche. Richard il Gobbo dice ai suoi nobili:
La coscienza non è che una parola usata dai codardi, Escogitata da principio per tenere a freno i forti.
Come ho detto, il fatto è lampante. Shakespeare aveva pensato a Nietzsche e alla Morale del Signore; ma la soppesò secondo il suo giusto valore e la collocò al suo giusto posto. Il suo giusto posto è la bocca di un gobbo mezzo folle alla vigilia della disfatta. Questa rabbia contro i deboli è possibile soltanto in un uomo morbosamente coraggioso ma nel fondo malato; un uomo come Richard, un uomo come Nietzsche. Questo caso da solo dovrebbe distruggere l’assurda fantasia che queste filosofie moderne siano moderne nel senso che i grandi uomini del passato non vi avessero pensato. Vi pensarono; solo che non ne fecero gran conto. Non è che Shakespeare non vedesse l’idea di Nietzsche; la vide, e vide oltre di essa.
Prenderò un altro esempio: il signor Bernard Shaw nel suo dramma sorprendente e sincero intitolato “Major Barbara” scaglia una delle più violente delle sue sfide verbali alla morale proverbiale. La gente dice: «La povertà non è un delitto». «Sì», dice il signor Bernard Shaw, «la povertà è un delitto, e la madre dei delitti. È un delitto essere poveri se si potrebbe magari ribellarsi o arricchirsi. Essere poveri significa essere di animo meschino, servili o subdoli». Il signor Shaw mostra segni dell’intenzione di concentrarsi su questa dottrina, e molti dei suoi seguaci fanno lo stesso. Ora, è soltanto la concentrazione a essere nuova, non la dottrina. Thackeray fa dire a Becky Sharp che è facile essere morali con mille sterline l’anno, e tanto difficile con cento. Ma, come nel caso di Shakespeare che ho citato, il punto non è semplicemente che Thackeray conoscesse questa concezione, bensì che sapeva esattamente quanto valesse. Non solo gli venne in mente, ma seppe dove dovesse capitare. Doveva capitare nella conversazione di Becky Sharp; una donna sagace e non priva di sincerità, ma profondamente ignara di tutte le emozioni più profonde che rendono la vita degna di essere vissuta. Il cinismo di Becky, con Lady Jane e Dobbin a bilanciarlo, possiede una certa arieggiante verità. Il cinismo dell’Undershaft del signor Shaw, predicato da solo con l’austerità di un predicatore da campo, non è semplicemente vero per nulla. Non è semplicemente vero per nulla dire che i poverissimi siano nel complesso più insinceri o più striscianti dei ricchissimi. La mezza verità di Becky è diventata dapprima una fisima, poi un credo, e infine una menzogna. Nel caso di Thackeray, come in quello di Shakespeare, la conclusione che ci riguarda è la stessa. Ciò che chiamiamo idee nuove sono generalmente frammenti spezzati delle idee antiche. Non è che una data nozione non entrasse nella testa di Shakespeare; è che vi trovava un buon numero di altre nozioni in attesa di cavarne fuori l’insensatezza.
MONSTERS AND THE MIDDLE AGES
I do not remember to have read anywhere an adequate and comprehensive account of the fabulous monsters so much written of in the Middle Ages. Such studies as I have seen suffered from the three or four strange and senseless blunders which throttle all our thought on such subjects. The primary blunder, of course, is that comic one to which students like Mr. Frazer have lent, or rather pawned, their authority. I mean the absurd notion that in matters of the imagination men have any need to copy from each other. Poems and poetic tales tend to be a little alike, not because Hebrews were really Chaldeans, nor because Christians were really Pagans, but because men are really men. Because there is, in spite of all the trend of modern thought, such a thing as man and the brotherhood of men. Anyone who has really looked at the moon might have called the moon a virgin and a huntress without ever having heard of Diana. Anyone who had ever looked at the sun might call it the god of oracles and of healing without having heard of Apollo. A man in love, walking about in a garden, compares a woman to a flower, and not to an earwig; though an earwig also was made by God, and has many superiorities to flowers in point of education and travel. To hear some people talk, one would think that the love of flowers had been imposed by some long priestly tradition, and the love of earwigs forbidden by some fearful tribal taboo.
The second great blunder is to suppose that such fables, even when they really are borrowed from older sources, are used in an old tired and customary spirit. When the soul really wakes it always deals directly with the nearest things. If, let us say, a man woke up in bed from a celestial dream which told him to go on painting till all was blue, he would begin by painting himself blue, then his bed blue, and so on. But he would be using all the machinery that came to hand; and that is exactly what always happens in real spiritual revolutions. They work by their environment even when they alter it.
Thus, when professors tell us that the Christians “borrowed” this or that fable or monster from the heathens, it is as if people said that a bricklayer had “borrowed” his bricks from clay, or a chemist had “borrowed” his explosives from chemicals; or that the Gothic builders of Lincoln or Beauvais had “borrowed” the pointed arch from the thin lattices of the Moors. Perhaps they did borrow it, but (by heaven!) they paid it back.
Five or six other similar errors need not detain us now. For upon these two rests the essential error about, let us say, unicorns; which, after all, is our chief affair in life. The mystical monsters talked of in the Middle Ages had most of them, no doubt, a tradition older than Christianity. I do not admit this because many of the most eminent authorities would say so. As Swinburne said in his conversation with Persephone, “I have lived long enough to have known one thing”; that eminent men mean successful men, and that successful men really hate Christianity. But it is evident from the general tradition of life and letters. I think that someone in the Old Testament says that the unicorn is a very difficult animal to catch; and certainly it has not been caught yet. If nobody has yet said that in this case “unicorn” must mean rhinoceros, somebody soon will, but it shall not be I. But though it is probably true that many of these medieval monsters were of pagan origin, this truth, which is always repeated, is far less startling than another truth that is always ignored.
The monster of the pagan fables was always, so far as I can see, an emblem of evil. That is to say, he was really a monster; he was abnormal; or as Kingsley put it in those fine and highly heathen hexameters:
Twi-formed strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers. Vainly rebelling, they rage till they die by the swords of the heroes.
Sometimes the monster, once killed, could be used to kill other monsters; as Perseus used the Gorgon to kill the dragons of the sea. But this is a mere accident of material. I can imagine, in the same way, that if I could put the head of a folk-lore professor on the end of a stick, in the French Revolutionary manner, it might serve very excellently as a heavy wooden club for beating in the heads of other and less hardened folk-lore professors. Or, again, the hydra, which grew two heads for every one that was cut off, might have been praised as an emblem of branching evolution and the advantage of an increasing population. But, as a fact, the hydra was not praised. He was killed, amid general relief. The minotaur might have been admired by moderns as the meeting-place of men and animals; the chimera might have been admired by moderns as an instance of the principle that three heads are better than one. I say that the hydra and chimera might have been admired by moderns. But they were not admired by ancients. Among the pagans the grotesque, fabulous animal was thought of only as something you ought to kill. Sometimes it killed you, like the sphinx; but even when it had done that, you did not really love it.
Now the case of the reappearance of such unearthly animals after Europe became Christendom is the thing I have never seen properly described. In one of the oldest of the legends of St. George and the Dragon, St. George did not kill the Dragon, but led it captive and sprinkled it with holy water. Something of the same sort happened to that whole department of the human mind which creates violent and unnatural images. Take the griffin for example. In our time the griffin, like most other medieval symbols, has been made a mean and farcical thing for fancy-dress balls: in twenty pictures from Punch, for instance, we can see the griffin and the turtle as supporters of the civic arms of London. For the modern “citizen” the arrangement is excellent; the griffin, which eats him, does not exist; the turtle, which he eats, does exist. But not only was the griffin not always trivial, but he was not always even bad. He was a mystical incorporation of two animals held wholly sacred: the lion of St. Mark, the lion of generosity, valour, victory; the eagle of St. John, the eagle of truth, of aspiration, of intellectual liberty. Thus the griffin was often used as the emblem of Christ; as combining the eagle and the lion in that mysterious and complete compound in which Christ combined the divine and human. But even if you thought of the griffin as good, you were not less afraid of him. Perhaps more.
But the strongest case is that of the unicorn, which I intended to figure prominently in this article but which seems to have evaded my thought in a most miraculous manner, and which up to this time I seem to have practically omitted. He is a terrible creature, the unicorn; and though he seems to live rather vaguely in Africa, I could never be surprised if he came walking up one of the four white roads that lead to Beaconsfield; the monster whiter than the roads, and his horn higher than the church spire. For all these mystical animals were imagined as enormously big as well as incalculably fierce and free. The stamping of the awful unicorn would shake the endless deserts in which it dwelt; and the wings of the vast griffin went over one’s head in heaven with the thunder of a thousand cherubim. And yet the fact remains that if you had asked a medieval man what the unicorn was supposed to mean, he would have replied “chastity”.
When we have understood that fact we shall understand a great many other things, but above all the civilisation out of which we come. Christianity did not conceive Christian virtues as tame, timid, and respectable things. It did conceive of these virtues as vast, defiant, and even destructive things, scorning the yoke of this world, dwelling in the desert, and seeking their meat from God. Till we have understood that no one will really understand even the “Lion and the Unicorn” over a pastry cook’s shop.
I MOSTRI E IL MEDIOEVO
Non ricordo di aver mai letto, in alcun luogo, un resoconto adeguato e organico di quei favolosi mostri di cui tanto si scrisse nel Medioevo. Gli studi che mi è capitato di vedere soffrivano dei tre o quattro strani e insensati equivoci che soffocano ogni nostro pensiero su simili argomenti. L’equivoco primario, s’intende, è quello comico al quale studiosi come il signor Frazer hanno prestato, o piuttosto impegnato, la propria autorità. Alludo all’assurda idea che, nelle cose dell’immaginazione, gli uomini abbiano bisogno di copiarsi a vicenda. Poesie e racconti poetici tendono a somigliarsi un poco, non perché gli Ebrei fossero in realtà Caldei, né perché i Cristiani fossero in realtà Pagani, ma perché gli uomini sono realmente uomini. Perché esiste, a dispetto di tutta la tendenza del pensiero moderno, una cosa come l’uomo e la fratellanza degli uomini. Chiunque abbia davvero guardato la luna potrebbe aver chiamato la luna una vergine e una cacciatrice senza aver mai sentito parlare di Diana. Chiunque avesse mai guardato il sole potrebbe chiamarlo il dio degli oracoli e della guarigione senza aver mai sentito parlare di Apollo. Un uomo innamorato, passeggiando per un giardino, paragona una donna a un fiore, e non a una forbicina; benché anche la forbicina sia stata fatta da Dio, e vanti molte superiorità sui fiori in fatto di istruzione e di viaggi. A sentir discorrere certa gente, si direbbe che l’amore per i fiori sia stato imposto da qualche lunga tradizione sacerdotale, e l’amore per le forbicine proibito da qualche pauroso tabù tribale.
Il secondo grande equivoco consiste nel supporre che simili favole, anche quando davvero sono prese in prestito da fonti più antiche, vengano usate in uno spirito vecchio, stanco e consuetudinario. Quando l’anima si desta davvero, essa tratta sempre direttamente con le cose più vicine. Se, poniamo, un uomo si svegliasse nel suo letto da un sogno celeste che gli ordinasse di dipingere finché tutto non fosse azzurro, comincerebbe col dipingere di azzurro sé stesso, poi il letto, e così via. Ma si servirebbe di tutta la macchina che gli capitasse sottomano; ed è esattamente ciò che accade sempre nelle vere rivoluzioni spirituali. Esse operano attraverso il proprio ambiente anche quando lo mutano.
Così, quando i professori ci dicono che i Cristiani «presero in prestito» questa o quella favola o mostro dai pagani, è come se si dicesse che un muratore avesse «preso in prestito» i suoi mattoni dall’argilla, o un chimico avesse «preso in prestito» i suoi esplosivi dalle sostanze chimiche; o che i costruttori gotici di Lincoln o di Beauvais avessero «preso in prestito» l’arco a sesto acuto dalle sottili grate dei Mori. Forse lo presero davvero in prestito, ma (per il cielo!) lo restituirono con gli interessi.
Cinque o sei altri errori simili non ci tratterranno ora. Poiché su questi due riposa l’errore essenziale intorno, diciamo, agli unicorni; il che, dopotutto, è la nostra principale faccenda nella vita. I mostri mistici di cui si parlava nel Medioevo avevano quasi tutti, senza dubbio, una tradizione più antica del Cristianesimo. Non lo ammetto perché lo direbbero molte delle più eminenti autorità. Come disse Swinburne nella sua conversazione con Persefone: «Ho vissuto abbastanza a lungo da aver appreso una cosa»; che gli uomini eminenti sono gli uomini di successo, e che gli uomini di successo, in verità, odiano il Cristianesimo. Ma ciò è evidente dalla tradizione generale della vita e delle lettere. Mi pare che qualcuno, nell’Antico Testamento, dica che l’unicorno è un animale assai difficile da catturare; e certo non è stato catturato ancora. Se nessuno ha finora affermato che in questo caso «unicorno» debba significare rinoceronte, qualcuno presto lo farà, ma non sarò io. Eppure, per quanto sia probabilmente vero che molti di questi mostri medievali fossero di origine pagana, questa verità, che viene sempre ripetuta, è assai meno sorprendente di un’altra verità che viene sempre ignorata.
Il mostro delle favole pagane era sempre, per quanto io possa vedere, un emblema del male. Vale a dire che era realmente un mostro; era abnorme; o, come lo pose Kingsley in quei bei esametri sommamente pagani:
Biformi, strani, senza simili, che non obbediscono ai sovrani dalle chiome d’oro. Ribellandosi invano, infuriano finché non muoiono per le spade degli eroi.
Talora il mostro, una volta ucciso, poteva servire a uccidere altri mostri; come Perseo si servì della Gorgone per uccidere i draghi del mare. Ma questo è un mero accidente della materia. Posso immaginare, allo stesso modo, che se potessi infilzare la testa di un professore di folclore sulla punta di un bastone, alla maniera della Rivoluzione francese, essa potrebbe servire eccellentemente come pesante clava di legno per sfondare le teste di altri professori di folclore, meno induriti. O, ancora, l’idra, che faceva crescere due teste per ognuna che le veniva tagliata, avrebbe potuto essere lodata come emblema dell’evoluzione ramificata e del vantaggio di una popolazione crescente. Ma, di fatto, l’idra non fu lodata. Fu uccisa, tra il sollievo generale. Il minotauro avrebbe potuto essere ammirato dai moderni come luogo d’incontro tra uomini e animali; la chimera avrebbe potuto essere ammirata dai moderni come esempio del principio che tre teste sono meglio di una. Dico che l’idra e la chimera avrebbero potuto essere ammirate dai moderni. Ma non furono ammirate dagli antichi. Presso i pagani, l’animale grottesco e favoloso era concepito soltanto come qualcosa che si aveva il dovere di uccidere. Talora esso uccideva te, come la sfinge; ma anche quando l’aveva fatto, tu non l’amavi davvero.
Ora, il caso della ricomparsa di simili animali ultraterreni dopo che l’Europa divenne Cristianità è la cosa che non ho mai visto descritta come si conviene. In una delle più antiche leggende di San Giorgio e il Drago, San Giorgio non uccise il Drago, ma lo condusse prigioniero e lo asperse d’acqua santa. Qualcosa di simile accadde a tutto quel reparto della mente umana che crea immagini violente e innaturali. Si prenda il grifone, ad esempio. Ai nostri giorni il grifone, come la maggior parte degli altri simboli medievali, è stato ridotto a cosa meschina e farsesca per i balli in maschera: in venti vignette del Punch, ad esempio, possiamo vedere il grifone e la testuggine come sostegni dello stemma civico di Londra. Per il «cittadino» moderno la disposizione è eccellente; il grifone, che lo divora, non esiste; la testuggine, che egli divora, esiste. Ma il grifone non solo non fu sempre triviale: non fu neppure sempre malvagio. Egli era una mistica incarnazione di due animali ritenuti interamente sacri: il leone di San Marco, il leone della generosità, del valore, della vittoria; l’aquila di San Giovanni, l’aquila della verità, dell’aspirazione, della libertà intellettuale. Così il grifone fu spesso usato come emblema di Cristo; in quanto combinava l’aquila e il leone in quel misterioso e completo composto in cui Cristo combinava il divino e l’umano. Ma anche se pensavi al grifone come a un essere buono, non per questo lo temevi di meno. Forse di più.
Ma il caso più forte è quello dell’unicorno, che intendevo far figurare in primo piano in questo articolo, ma che sembra aver eluso il mio pensiero nella maniera più miracolosa, e che fino a questo momento pare che io abbia praticamente omesso. È una creatura terribile, l’unicorno; e benché sembri vivere piuttosto vagamente in Africa, non potrei mai stupirmi se venisse su per una delle quattro bianche strade che conducono a Beaconsfield; il mostro più bianco delle strade, e il suo corno più alto della guglia della chiesa. Poiché tutti questi mistici animali venivano immaginati enormemente grandi, non meno che incalcolabilmente feroci e liberi. Lo scalpitare del terribile unicorno faceva tremare gli sconfinati deserti in cui dimorava; e le ali dell’immenso grifone passavano sul capo di chi guardava, nel cielo, col tuono di mille cherubini. Eppure resta il fatto che, se aveste chiesto a un uomo del Medioevo che cosa dovesse significare l’unicorno, egli avrebbe risposto: «castità».
Quando avremo compreso questo fatto, comprenderemo molte altre cose, ma soprattutto la civiltà da cui proveniamo. Il Cristianesimo non concepì le virtù cristiane come cose docili, timide e rispettabili. Concepì bensì queste virtù come cose vaste, sfidanti e persino distruttive, sprezzanti del giogo di questo mondo, dimoranti nel deserto e cercanti il proprio cibo presso Dio. Finché non avremo compreso questo, nessuno comprenderà davvero neppure il «Leone e l’Unicorno» insegna sopra la bottega di un pasticciere.
WHAT NOVELISTS ARE FOR
A long time ago, when I happened to be living in Rye in Sussex, I had the honour of being visited by two very distinguished men; they were both Americans, indeed, they were brothers; but the type of their success seemed oddly different. One was Henry James, the novelist, who lived next door; the other was William James, the philosopher, who had just crossed the Atlantic and seemed as breezy as the sea. In fact, there was an almost fantastic contrast between the two men: the one so solemn about social details often considered trivial; the other so hearty about abstract studies generally considered dry. Henry James talked about toast and teacups with the impressiveness of a family ghost; while William James talked about the metabolism and the involution of values with the air of a man recounting his flirtations on the steamer. But though I had and have the greatest possible regard for them both, I cannot but think that a certain relative completeness, and incompleteness, in the contrast between them reveals a certain truth about two different types of letters.
I was recently rereading one of the late Harvey Wickham’s exceedingly clever studies of modern thought; including the study of William James. I think the critic was mainly just about the philosophy, but not quite just about the philosopher. I do not myself think that Pragmatism can ever stand up as a serious rival to the permanent philosophy of Truth and the Absolute. But I do think that William James did really stand up as a rattling good fighter and cleaner-up of the particular sort of solemn nonsense most current in his time. He may have only indirectly served the cause of belief in belief. But he did a lot to serve the cause of unbelief in unbelief; a very wholesome object. But that is not my main point. It seems to me that where William James failed was exactly where Henry James succeeded; in making a whole scheme out of fine shades and doubtful cases. Now that can be done with a novel; for it only claims to be exceptional. It cannot be done with philosophy; for it must claim to be universal.
Pragmatism fails because it is a cosmos made out of odds and ends. But stories are better for being made out of odds and ends; especially if the ends are very odd. Recalling at random some Henry James stories, there was one about an intelligent youth who unaccountably became a sort of tame cat in the house of a couple of rich but unspeakably dull people. But it is not because he is a snob or a plate-licker; but because he is really touched by a devotion and delusion of the old couple, about their dead daughter, whose life they continue in a sort of waking dream, in which the young man figures as her lover. It is beautifully and delicately done; and it does not seem impossible. Now if we apply to this any moral philosophy on earth, however modern, however mad, we shall all shrink from laying it down as a general rule that young men ought to cadge on old men, that they ought to encourage delusions; that this ménage is a model for the normal home. But that is exactly what a novelist is for. He is not bound to justify human beings, but only to humanise them. It is for him and not the philosopher to deal with all this chapter of accidents; in which “things work out differently in practice”. William James’s mistake was that he did not put his notions into novels, like his brother; where such opportunism is quite appropriate. He tried to make a cosmic system out of these accidents and this opportunism; and the system is not systematic. The comparison carries a faint hint that novelists may be some use after all.
THE SONG OF ROLAND
MOST OF us remember reading, in the school histories of our childhood, that at the Battle of Hastings Taillefer the Jongleur went in front of the Norman Army, throwing his sword in the air and singing the Song of Roland. They were naturally histories of a very Victorian sort, which passed lightly over the Roman Empire and the Crusades on the way to serious things, such as the genealogy of George I or the administration of Addington. But that one image emerged in the imagination as something alive in its dead surroundings; like finding a familiar face in a faded tapestry. The song he sang was presumably not the noble and rugged epic which Major Scott Moncrieff has done so solid and even historic a service to letters in rendering in its entirety. The Jongleur must at least have selected extracts or favourite passages, or the battles would have been unduly delayed. But the tale has the same moral as the translation; since both have the same inspiration. The value of the tale was that it did suggest to the childish mind, through all the deadening effects of distance and indifference, that a man does not make such a gesture with a sword unless he feels something, and that a man does not sing unless he has something to sing about. Dull avarice and an appetite for feudal lands do not inspire such jugglery. In short the value of the tale was that it hinted that there is a heart in history, even remote history. And the value of the translation is that if we are really to learn history we must, in a double sense of the word, learn it by heart. We must learn it at length and as it were at large; lingering over chance spaces of contemporary work, for love of its detail, and one might almost say for love of its dullness. Even a random reader like myself, only dipping here and there into such things, so long as they are really things of the period, can often learn more from them than from the most careful constitutional digests or political summaries by modern men more learned than himself. A modern man, educated on the modern histories, may find here the things he does not expect. I have here only space for one example, out of many that I could give to show what I mean. Most of the stock histories tell the young student something of what Feudalism was in legal form and custom; that the subordinates were called vassals, that they did homage, and so on. But they do it somehow in such a way as to suggest a savage and sullen obedience; as if a vassal were no more than a serf. What is left out is the fact that the homage really was homage; a thing worthy of a man. The first feudal feeling had something ideal and even impersonal, like patriotism. The nations were not yet born; and these smaller groups had almost the soul of nations. The reader will find the word “vassalage” used again and again on a note which is not only heroic but even haughty. The vassal is obviously as proud of being a vassal as anybody could be of being a lord. Indeed the feudal poet uses the word “vassalage” where a modern poet would use the word “chivalry”. The Paladins charging the Paynim are spurred on by vassalage. Turpin the Archbishop hacks the Moslem chieftain rib from rib; and the Christians, beholding his triumph, cry aloud in their pride that he has shown great vassalage; and that with such an Archbishop the Cross is safe. There were no Conscientious Objections in their Christianity.
This is a type of the truths that historical literature ought to make us feel; but which mere histories very seldom do. The one example I have already given, of the Jongleur at Hastings, is a complexity of curious truths that might be conveyed and which very seldom are. We might have learned, for instance, what a Jongleur was; and realised that this one may have had feelings as deep and fantastic as the Jongleur celebrated in the twelfth-century poem, who died gloriously of dancing and turning somersaults before the image of Our Lady; that he was of the trade taken as a type by the mystical mirth of St. Francis, who called his monks the Jugglers of God. A man must read at least a little of the contemporary work itself before he thus finds the human heart inside the armour and the monastic gown; the men who write the philosophy of history seldom give us the philosophy, still less the religion, of the historical characters. And the final example of this is something which is also illustrated by the obscure minstrel who threw up his sword as he sang the Song of Roland, as well as by the Song of Roland itself. Modern history, mainly ethnological or economic, always talks of a thing like the Norman adventure in the somewhat vulgar language of success, but it is well to note, in the real Norman story, that the very bard in front of their battle-line was shouting the glorification of failure. It testifies to a truth in the very heart of Christendom that even the court poet of William the Conqueror was celebrating Roland the conquered.
That high note of the forlorn hope, of a host at bay and a battle against odds without end, is the note on which the great French epic ends. I know nothing more moving in poetry than that strange and unexpected end; that splendidly inconclusive conclusion. Charlemagne, the great Christian emperor, has at last established his empire in quiet, has done justice almost in the manner of a day of judgment, and sleeps as it were upon his throne with a peace almost like that of Paradise. And there appears to him the angel of God crying aloud that his arms are needed in a new and distant land, and that he must take up again the endless march of his days. And the great king tears his long white beard and cries out against his restless life. The poem ends, as it were with a vision and vista of wars against the barbarians; and the vision is true. For that war is never ended which defends the sanity of the world against all the stark anarchies and rending negations which rage against it for ever. That war is never finished in this world; and the grass has hardly grown on the graves of our own friends who fell in it.
A CHE COSA SERVONO I ROMANZIERI
Molto tempo fa, quando mi trovavo per caso a vivere a Rye, nel Sussex, ebbi l’onore di ricevere la visita di due uomini illustrissimi; erano entrambi americani e, per giunta, fratelli; ma il tipo del loro successo appariva stranamente diverso. L’uno era Henry James, il romanziere, che abitava nella casa accanto; l’altro era William James, il filosofo, che aveva appena attraversato l’Atlantico e sembrava frizzante come il mare. In verità, fra i due uomini correva un contrasto quasi fantastico: l’uno così solenne intorno a particolari mondani spesso ritenuti insignificanti; l’altro così cordiale intorno a studi astratti generalmente ritenuti aridi. Henry James parlava di crostini e di tazze da tè con l’imponenza di un fantasma di famiglia; mentre William James parlava del metabolismo e dell’involuzione dei valori con l’aria di un uomo che rievoca i propri amoreggiamenti sul piroscafo. Ma per quanto io nutrissi e nutra la più grande stima possibile per l’uno e per l’altro, non posso fare a meno di pensare che una certa completezza, e incompletezza, relativa, nel contrasto fra loro, riveli una certa verità intorno a due diversi tipi di lettere.
Di recente rileggevo uno dei saggi straordinariamente acuti del compianto Harvey Wickham sul pensiero moderno, compreso quello su William James. Credo che il critico fosse sostanzialmente equo verso la filosofia, ma non del tutto equo verso il filosofo. Non penso, da parte mia, che il Pragmatismo possa mai reggere come serio rivale della filosofia perenne della Verità e dell’Assoluto. Ma penso davvero che William James si sia effettivamente imposto come un combattente in gamba e un solerte spazzino di quella particolare specie di solenni sciocchezze che più correvano ai suoi tempi. Può darsi che egli abbia servito solo indirettamente la causa della fede nella fede. Ma fece molto per servire la causa dell’incredulità nell’incredulità; obiettivo assai salutare. Ma non è questo il mio punto principale. Mi sembra che là dove William James fallì fosse esattamente là dove Henry James riuscì: nel comporre un intero disegno a partire da sottili sfumature e da casi dubbi. Ora, questo lo si può fare con un romanzo, poiché esso pretende soltanto di essere eccezionale. Non lo si può fare con la filosofia, poiché essa deve pretendere di essere universale.
Il Pragmatismo fallisce perché è un cosmo fatto di ritagli e avanzi. Ma le storie sono migliori quando sono fatte di ritagli e avanzi; specialmente se gli avanzi sono molto strani. Rievocando a caso alcune storie di Henry James, ce n’era una su un giovane intelligente che, inspiegabilmente, diveniva una sorta di gatto addomesticato nella casa di una coppia di persone ricche ma indicibilmente ottuse. Ma ciò non accade perché egli sia uno snob o un leccapiedi, bensì perché è realmente commosso da una devozione e da un’illusione della vecchia coppia riguardo alla figlia morta, la cui vita essi prolungano in una sorta di sogno a occhi aperti, nel quale il giovane figura come l’amante di lei. È fatto in modo mirabile e delicato; e non pare impossibile. Ora, se applichiamo a tutto questo una qualsiasi filosofia morale al mondo, per quanto moderna, per quanto folle, tutti rifuggiremo dallo stabilire come regola generale che i giovani debbano scroccare ai vecchi, che debbano incoraggiarne le illusioni, che questo ménage sia un modello per il normale focolare. Ma è esattamente a questo che serve un romanziere. Egli non è tenuto a giustificare gli esseri umani, ma soltanto a umanizzarli. Spetta a lui, e non al filosofo, occuparsi di tutto questo capitolo degli imprevisti, nel quale «le cose vanno diversamente nella pratica». L’errore di William James fu che non riversò le sue idee in romanzi, come il fratello, dove un simile opportunismo è del tutto appropriato. Cercò di ricavare un sistema cosmico da questi imprevisti e da questo opportunismo; e il sistema non è sistematico. Il paragone reca con sé un tenue accenno al fatto che i romanzieri possono, dopo tutto, essere di qualche utilità.
LA CANZONE DI ORLANDO
QUASI TUTTI noi ricordiamo di aver letto, nei manuali di storia della nostra infanzia, che alla Battaglia di Hastings Taillefer il Giullare avanzò dinanzi all’Esercito Normanno, lanciando in aria la spada e cantando la Canzone di Orlando. Erano, naturalmente, manuali di storia di stampo assai vittoriano, che passavano lievemente sopra l’Impero Romano e le Crociate per giungere a cose serie, come la genealogia di Giorgio I o l’amministrazione di Addington. Ma quell’unica immagine emergeva nell’immaginazione come qualcosa di vivo nel suo morto contesto, come quando si scorge un volto familiare in un arazzo sbiadito. La canzone che egli cantava non era, presumibilmente, il nobile e aspro poema epico che il Maggiore Scott Moncrieff ha reso alle lettere un servizio così solido e persino storico traducendolo per intero. Il Giullare deve aver scelto, come minimo, brani o passi prediletti, altrimenti le battaglie ne sarebbero state indebitamente ritardate. Ma il racconto reca la stessa morale della traduzione, poiché entrambi hanno la medesima ispirazione. Il pregio del racconto stava nel suggerire alla mente infantile, attraverso tutti gli effetti attutenti della distanza e dell’indifferenza, che un uomo non compie un simile gesto con una spada se non prova qualcosa, e che un uomo non canta se non ha qualcosa da cantare. La cupa avarizia e l’appetito di terre feudali non ispirano tali giochi di destrezza. In breve, il pregio del racconto stava nel lasciar intendere che c’è un cuore nella storia, persino nella storia remota. E il pregio della traduzione sta nel fatto che, se vogliamo davvero imparare la storia, dobbiamo, in un duplice senso della parola, impararla a memoria. Dobbiamo impararla per esteso e, per così dire, in larghezza, indugiando sugli spazi casuali dell’opera contemporanea, per amore del suo dettaglio, e si potrebbe quasi dire per amore della sua monotonia. Persino un lettore casuale come me, che soltanto qua e là si immerge in cose simili, purché siano davvero cose dell’epoca, può spesso imparare di più da esse che dai più accurati compendi costituzionali o dai riassunti politici di uomini moderni più dotti di lui. Un uomo moderno, educato sui manuali di storia moderni, può trovarvi le cose che non si aspetta. Ho qui spazio soltanto per un esempio, fra i molti che potrei addurre a chiarire ciò che intendo. La maggior parte dei manuali consueti dice al giovane studente qualcosa di ciò che il Feudalesimo fu nella forma e nell’usanza giuridica: che i subordinati si chiamavano vassalli, che prestavano omaggio, e così via. Ma lo fa in qualche modo tale da suggerire un’obbedienza selvaggia e imbronciata, come se un vassallo non fosse altro che un servo della gleba. Ciò che si tralascia è il fatto che l’omaggio era davvero omaggio, cosa degna di un uomo. Il primo sentimento feudale aveva qualcosa di ideale e persino di impersonale, come il patriottismo. Le nazioni non erano ancora nate; e questi gruppi più piccoli avevano quasi l’anima di nazioni. Il lettore troverà la parola «vassallaggio» usata più e più volte in un tono che non è soltanto eroico ma addirittura altero. Il vassallo è manifestamente altrettanto fiero di essere vassallo quanto chiunque potrebbe esserlo di essere signore. Anzi, il poeta feudale usa la parola «vassallaggio» là dove un poeta moderno userebbe la parola «cavalleria». I Paladini che caricano i Pagani sono sospinti dal vassallaggio. Turpino l’Arcivescovo fa a pezzi il capo musulmano, costola dopo costola; e i Cristiani, al veder il suo trionfo, gridano nel loro orgoglio che egli ha dato prova di gran vassallaggio, e che con un simile Arcivescovo la Croce è al sicuro. Non c’erano Obiezioni di Coscienza nel loro Cristianesimo.
Questo è un esempio di quelle verità che la letteratura storica dovrebbe farci sentire, ma che i meri manuali di storia molto di rado ci fanno sentire. L’unico esempio che ho già dato, quello del Giullare a Hastings, è un intreccio di curiose verità che potrebbero essere trasmesse e che molto di rado lo sono. Avremmo potuto apprendere, per esempio, che cosa fosse un Giullare, e renderci conto che questi poteva provare sentimenti profondi e fantastici quanto il Giullare celebrato nel poema del dodicesimo secolo, che morì gloriosamente danzando e facendo capriole dinanzi all’immagine di Nostra Signora; che egli apparteneva al mestiere assunto a modello dalla mistica letizia di San Francesco, il quale chiamava i suoi frati i Giullari di Dio. Un uomo deve leggere almeno un poco dell’opera contemporanea stessa prima di trovare così il cuore umano dentro l’armatura e la tonaca monastica; gli uomini che scrivono la filosofia della storia di rado ci danno la filosofia, e ancor meno la religione, dei personaggi storici. E l’esempio finale di ciò è qualcosa che è illustrato anche dall’oscuro menestrello che lanciava in alto la sua spada mentre cantava la Canzone di Orlando, tanto quanto dalla Canzone di Orlando stessa. La storia moderna, prevalentemente etnologica o economica, parla sempre di una cosa come l’avventura normanna nel linguaggio alquanto volgare del successo; ma è bene notare, nella vera vicenda normanna, che proprio il bardo posto in testa alla loro linea di battaglia gridava la glorificazione del fallimento. Testimonia una verità insita nel cuore stesso della Cristianità il fatto che persino il poeta di corte di Guglielmo il Conquistatore celebrasse Orlando il vinto.
Quella nota alta della speranza disperata, di una schiera messa alle strette e di una battaglia contro avversità senza fine, è la nota su cui si chiude il grande poema epico francese. Non conosco nulla di più commovente, in poesia, di quel finale strano e inatteso; di quella conclusione splendidamente inconclusiva. Carlomagno, il grande imperatore cristiano, ha finalmente stabilito il suo impero nella quiete, ha reso giustizia quasi al modo di un giorno del giudizio, e dorme per così dire sul suo trono con una pace quasi simile a quella del Paradiso. Ed ecco che gli appare l’angelo di Dio, gridando a gran voce che le sue armi sono necessarie in una terra nuova e lontana, e che egli deve riprendere la marcia interminabile dei suoi giorni. E il grande re si strappa la lunga barba bianca e leva grida contro la sua vita senza riposo. Il poema si chiude, per così dire, con una visione e una prospettiva di guerre contro i barbari; e la visione è vera. Poiché mai finisce quella guerra che difende la salute mentale del mondo contro tutte le fosche anarchie e le negazioni laceranti che infuriano contro di esso per sempre. Quella guerra non è mai conclusa in questo mondo; e l’erba è appena cresciuta sulle tombe dei nostri stessi amici che vi sono caduti.
THE SUPERSTITION OF SCHOOL
It is an error to suppose that advancing years bring retrogressing opinions. In other words, it is not true that men growing old must be growing reactionary. Some of the difficulties of recent times have been due to the obstinate optimism of the old revolutionary. Magnificent old men like Kropotkin and Whitman and William Morris went to their graves expecting Utopia if they did not expect Heaven. But the falsehood, like so many falsehoods, is a false version of a half-truth. The truth, or half-truth, is not that men must learn by experience to be reactionaries; but that they must learn by experience to expect reactions. And when I say reactions I mean reactions; I must apologise, in the world of current culture, for using the word in its correct sense.
If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man’s ideals that change it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, “You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older”, says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.
These are the snags of sociology; and one of them concerned with Education. If you ask me whether I think the populace, especially the poor, should be recognised as citizens who can rule the state, I answer in a voice of thunder, “Yes”. If you ask me whether I think they ought to have education, in the sense of a wide culture and familiarity with the classics of history, I again answer, “Yes”. But there is, in the achievement of this purpose, a sort of snag or recoil that can only be discovered by experience and does not appear in print at all. It is not allowed for on paper, even so much as is the recoil of a gun. Yet it is at this moment an exceedingly practical part of practical politics; and, while it has been a political problem for a very long time past, it is a little more marked (if I may stain these serene and impartial pages with so political a suggestion) under recent conditions that have brought so many highly respectable Socialists and widely respected Trade Union officials to the front.
The snag in it is this: that the self-educated think far too much of education. I might add that the half-educated always think everything of education. That is not a fact that appears on the surface of the social plan or ideal; it is the sort of thing that can only be discovered by experience. When I said that I wanted the popular feeling to find political expression, I meant the actual and autochthonous popular feeling as it can be found in third-class carriages and bean-feasts and bank-holiday crowds; and especially, of course (for the earnest social seeker after truth), in public-houses. I thought, and I still think, that these people are right on a vast number of things on which the fashionable leaders are wrong. The snag is that when one of these people begins to “improve himself” it is exactly at that moment that I begin to doubt whether it is an improvement. He seems to me to collect with remarkable rapidity a number of superstitions, of which the most blind and benighted is what may be called the Superstition of School. He regards School, not as a normal social institution to be fitted in to other social institutions, like Home and Church and State; but as some sort of entirely supernormal and miraculous moral factory, in which perfect men and women are made by magic. To this idolatry of School he is ready to sacrifice Home and History and Humanity, with all its instincts and possibilities, at a moment’s notice. To this idol he will make any sacrifice, especially human sacrifice. And at the back of the mind, especially of the best men of this sort, there is almost always one of two variants of the same concentrated conception: either “If I had not been to School I should not be the great man I am now”, or else “If I had been to school I should be even greater than I am”. Let none say that I am scoffing at uneducated people; it is not their uneducation but their education that I scoff at. Let none mistake this for a sneer at the half-educated; what I dislike is the educated half. But I dislike it, not because I dislike education, but because, given the modern philosophy or absence of philosophy, education is turned against itself, destroying that very sense of variety and proportion which it is the object of education to give. No man who worships education has got the best out of education; no man who sacrifices everything to education is even educated. I need not mention here the many recent examples of this monomania, rapidly turning into mad persecution, such as the ludicrous persecution of the families who live on barges. What is wrong is a neglect of principle; and the principle is that without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete.
LA SUPERSTIZIONE DELLA SCUOLA
È un errore supporre che gli anni che avanzano portino con sé opinioni che retrocedono. In altre parole, non è vero che gli uomini, invecchiando, debbano per forza diventare reazionari. Alcune delle difficoltà dei tempi recenti sono derivate dall’ostinato ottimismo del vecchio rivoluzionario. Magnifici vegliardi come Kropotkin, Whitman e William Morris scesero nella tomba aspettandosi l’Utopia, se non addirittura il Cielo. Ma la falsità, come tante altre falsità, è una falsa versione di una mezza verità. La verità, o mezza verità, non è che gli uomini debbano imparare dall’esperienza a essere reazionari, bensì che debbano imparare dall’esperienza ad aspettarsi le reazioni. E quando dico reazioni intendo proprio reazioni: devo scusarmi, nel mondo della cultura corrente, di usare la parola nel suo significato corretto.
Se un ragazzo spara con un fucile, che sia contro una volpe, un possidente o un sovrano regnante, verrà rimproverato secondo il valore relativo di questi oggetti. Ma se spara con un fucile per la prima volta, è assai probabile che non si aspetti il rinculo, né sappia quale duro colpo esso possa assestargli. Potrà continuare a far fuoco per tutta la vita contro questi e simili bersagli del paesaggio; ma sarà sempre meno sorpreso dal rinculo, vale a dire dalla reazione. Potrà persino dissuadere la sorellina di sei anni dallo sparare con uno di quei pesanti fucili concepiti per l’abbattimento degli elefanti; e assumerà così l’apparenza di essere egli stesso un reazionario. Lo stesso principio si applica, all’incirca, allo sparo dei grossi cannoni della rivoluzione. Non sono gli ideali di un uomo a cambiare, non è la sua Utopia a essere alterata; il cinico che dice: «Dimenticherai tutte quelle fantasticherie dell’idealismo quando sarai più vecchio», dice l’esatto contrario della verità. I dubbi che vengono con l’età non riguardano l’ideale, ma il reale. E una delle cose che sono indubbiamente reali è la reazione: cioè la probabilità pratica di un qualche rovesciamento di direzione, e del nostro riuscire in parte a fare l’opposto di ciò che intendiamo fare. Ciò che l’esperienza davvero ci insegna è questo: che c’è qualcosa nella costituzione e nel meccanismo dell’umanità per cui il risultato di un’azione su di essa è spesso inatteso, e quasi sempre più complicato di quanto ci aspettiamo.
Questi sono gli scogli della sociologia; e uno di essi ha a che fare con l’istruzione. Se mi chiedete se io ritenga che il popolo, e specialmente i poveri, debba essere riconosciuto come composto di cittadini capaci di governare lo Stato, rispondo con voce di tuono: «Sì». Se mi chiedete se io ritenga che essi debbano avere un’istruzione, nel senso di una vasta cultura e di una familiarità con i classici della storia, rispondo di nuovo: «Sì». Ma vi è, nel conseguimento di questo scopo, una sorta di scoglio o di rinculo che può essere scoperto solo dall’esperienza e che non compare affatto sulla carta stampata. Non è previsto sulla carta, nemmeno quanto lo è il rinculo di un fucile. Eppure in questo momento è una parte oltremodo pratica della politica pratica; e, sebbene sia stato un problema politico per moltissimo tempo in passato, è un poco più marcato (se mi è concesso macchiare queste serene e imparziali pagine con un accenno tanto politico) sotto le condizioni recenti che hanno portato alla ribalta tanti rispettabilissimi socialisti e assai stimati funzionari dei sindacati (Union).
Lo scoglio è questo: che gli autodidatti pensano fin troppo all’istruzione. Potrei aggiungere che i semi-istruiti pensano sempre che l’istruzione sia tutto. Non è un fatto che appaia in superficie nel piano o nell’ideale sociale; è il genere di cosa che può essere scoperta solo dall’esperienza. Quando dissi che desideravo che il sentimento popolare trovasse espressione politica, intendevo il sentimento popolare reale e autoctono, quale lo si può trovare nelle carrozze di terza classe, nelle scampagnate e nella folla dei giorni festivi; e specialmente, s’intende (per il fervente cercatore sociale della verità), nelle osterie. Pensavo, e penso ancora, che questa gente ha ragione su un’infinità di cose sulle quali i capi alla moda hanno torto. Lo scoglio è che quando uno di costoro comincia a «migliorare sé stesso», è esattamente in quel momento che io comincio a dubitare che sia un miglioramento. Mi sembra che raccolga con notevole rapidità un certo numero di superstizioni, di cui la più cieca e ottenebrata è quella che si potrebbe chiamare la Superstizione della Scuola. Egli considera la Scuola non come una normale istituzione sociale da inserire fra le altre istituzioni sociali, come la Casa, la Chiesa e lo Stato, ma come una sorta di fabbrica morale del tutto anormale e miracolosa, in cui uomini e donne perfetti vengono prodotti per magia. A questa idolatria della Scuola egli è pronto a sacrificare la Casa, la Storia e l’Umanità, con tutti i loro istinti e le loro possibilità, in un batter d’occhio. A questo idolo egli offrirà qualsiasi sacrificio, e specialmente il sacrificio umano. E sul fondo della mente, soprattutto negli uomini migliori di questa specie, c’è quasi sempre una delle due varianti della medesima concentrata concezione: o «Se non fossi andato a Scuola non sarei il grand’uomo che sono adesso», oppure «Se fossi andato a scuola sarei ancora più grande di quanto sono». Nessuno dica che io mi faccia beffe delle persone non istruite; non è la loro mancanza d’istruzione, ma la loro istruzione che io metto in ridicolo. Nessuno scambi questo per uno sberleffo ai semi-istruiti; ciò che detesto è la metà istruita. Ma la detesto non perché detesti l’istruzione, bensì perché, data la filosofia moderna o l’assenza di filosofia, l’istruzione viene rivolta contro sé stessa, distruggendo quel senso stesso della varietà e della proporzione che è invece scopo dell’istruzione conferire. Nessun uomo che adori l’istruzione ha tratto il meglio dall’istruzione; nessun uomo che sacrifichi tutto all’istruzione è neppure istruito. Non ho bisogno di menzionare qui i molti esempi recenti di questa monomania, che va rapidamente trasformandosi in folle persecuzione, come la ridicola persecuzione delle famiglie che vivono sulle chiatte. Ciò che è sbagliato è una negligenza di principio; e il principio è che senza un lieve disprezzo per l’istruzione, nessuna istruzione di gentiluomo è completa.
I use the casual phrase casually; for I do not concern myself with the gentleman but with the citizen. Nevertheless, there is this historic half-truth in the case for aristocracy; that it is sometimes a little easier for the aristocrat, at his best, to have this last touch of culture which is a superiority to culture. Nevertheless, the truth of which I speak has nothing to do with any special culture of any special class. It has belonged to any number of peasants, especially when they were poets; it is this which gives a sort of natural distinction to Robert Burns and the peasant poets of Scotland. The power which produces it more effectively than any blood or breed is religion; for religion may be defined as that which puts the first things first. Robert Burns was justifiably impatient with the religion he inherited from Scottish Calvinism; but he owed something to his inheritance. His instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centred entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realise the stars.
THE ROMANCE OF A RASCAL
It was Thackeray, I think, somewhere in the dizzy mazes of his Roundabout Papers, who made a remark which throws some light on literary fashions and the fate of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. He described very vividly the fervour he felt as a boy for the Waverley Novels; and how those great romances filled the boyhood of those, like himself, who were to make the literature of that most romantic epoch which we call in England the Victorian era. He adds an interesting comment to this effect: “Our fathers used to talk about Peregrine Pickle, telling us (the sly old boys) that it was capital fun. But I think I was rather bewildered by it.”
That, I fear, may be the immediate effect upon many either of Thackeray’s period or even of our own period, where it has inherited the great literary tradition, which many learnt in youth from Thackeray, and which Thackeray learnt in youth from Scott. Most of those who grew up under such standards of fiction, as did the present writer, may be disposed to say at first that they find Smollett’s novel rather bewildering. Not quite so bewildering as some of the most modern novels, of course. But many people seem to have a singular literary test, by which they like being bewildered by a new book, but dislike being bewildered by an old one. As I shall point out presently, this is very largely because the new book is not so new as it pretends to be. And the old book is not so very old, as the real stages of history go. In short, the real moral of all these things is the astonishing rapidity with which moods and standards change and change again; often changing back from the third condition to the first. There is nothing so mystifying as the rapidity with which new literary methods harden, except the brittleness with which they break. Each traveller who turns the corner thinks it will lead him into a straight road of progress; but really it leads him, in about ten minutes, to another corner which turns into another and equally crooked road. The point about a book like Peregrine Pickle can be fixed fairly precisely, by considering what are the changes that separated him from Thackeray, or that separate Thackeray from us.
In that little phrase from the Roundabout Papers there are, to begin with, some interesting and even amusing points. For instance, we are always told that the Victorian parent, or, even more, the early nineteenth-century parent, was a Puritan who forbade his family the idle as well as the improper forms of light literature; a Heavy Father who sat very heavily even on ordinary love-stories or romantic plays. Even so eighteenth-century a type as Macaulay identified the opinion of most sober and responsible parents with so extraordinary a parent as Sir Anthony Absolute in the comic play. “A circulating library is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.” Even a modern so steeped in the eighteenth century as Mr. Max Beerbohm has described the typical papa of a generation that might well have been that of Thackeray’s papa, as a gloomy and ponderous person who talked to his children about nothing but Hell. Surely that one little glimpse from Thackeray’s own essays might lead one to guess that there is something wrong in all this. It is difficult to imagine the Puritan papa, who commonly talked about Hell, winding up with a recommendation to read Peregrine Pickle. It is difficult to suppose that a race of Sir Anthony Absolutes, disapproving of all novels, would have gone out of their way to select this novel, out of all earthly novels, on the ground that it was “capital fun”. The parent must have been a very sly old boy indeed if he really thrust Peregrine Pickle on the attention of a little boy, whose head was full of ideals of chivalry, like those of Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe.
The truth is that the elements were too mixed, and, above all, the fashions too fugitive, for any of these generalisations. Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions; but the conventions are more fleeting than fashions. There were papas who would have been almost as much shocked at their daughters reading Pride and Prejudice as at their reading Peregrine Pickle. But they were the papas and not the grand-papas. There was a sort of household where Hell was the brightest topic of chat; but it was not the old-fashioned household but rather the new-fashioned household. It came in with the Methodists, who were regarded as innovators and rebels. That episode of extreme severity, which was the beginning of the highly expurgated Victorian fiction, need not here be traced to its historical causes. Broadly speaking, it came from the rapid increase of wealth and power among the Nonconformists of the north, who vetoed the frankness both of the old gentry and the old peasantry of the south. The point here is that the work of these Puritans, from Lancashire or Yorkshire, was so very rapidly done that men forgot that it was so very recent. All this has to be understood before anybody, looking back through the nineteenth century, can do justice to the work of Smollett. The point of it is that not only did the changes come, but each generation accepted them as if they had always been unchangeable. Thus, in the case just mentioned, Thackeray began to write novels long after Dickens; he was still an artist, or art student, when he offered to illustrate Pickwick. Dickens, in the flood of his popularity that followed Pickwick, had already accepted and popularised what we call the Victorian conventions. This has been somewhat harshly expressed by Mr. Aldous Huxley when he said that a writer like Dickens writes as if he were a child, while a writer like Smollett writes as if he were a grown man. But indeed there is a considerable link between a writer like Smollett and a writer like Aldous Huxley. For the road has taken another sharp turn backwards; and the interlude of Victorian innocence is again out of sight. There is one instance of this, which dominates and largely explains the whole story of Peregrine Pickle.
Uso la frase disinvolta con disinvoltura; poiché non mi occupo del gentiluomo ma del cittadino. Ciò nondimeno, vi è questa storica mezza verità a favore dell’aristocrazia: che talvolta è un poco più facile per l’aristocratico, nel suo momento migliore, avere quest’ultimo tocco di cultura che è una superiorità rispetto alla cultura. Ciò nondimeno, la verità di cui parlo non ha nulla a che fare con alcuna cultura particolare di alcuna classe particolare. È appartenuta a un gran numero di contadini, specialmente quando erano poeti; è ciò che conferisce una sorta di naturale distinzione a Robert Burns e ai poeti contadini di Scozia. La forza che la produce più efficacemente di qualsiasi sangue o razza è la religione; poiché la religione può essere definita come ciò che mette al primo posto le cose che vengono prima. Robert Burns era giustificatamente insofferente della religione che aveva ereditato dal calvinismo scozzese; ma qualcosa doveva alla propria eredità. La sua istintiva considerazione degli uomini come uomini gli veniva da un lignaggio che teneva ancora più alla religione che all’istruzione. Nel momento in cui gli uomini cominciano a tenere più all’istruzione che alla religione, cominciano a tenere più all’ambizione che all’istruzione. Non è più un mondo in cui le anime di tutti sono uguali dinanzi al cielo, ma un mondo in cui la mente di ciascuno è tesa a conseguire un vantaggio diseguale sull’altro. Comincia a esserci una mera vanità nell’essere istruiti, che si tratti di istruzione da autodidatta o semplicemente di istruzione statale. L’istruzione dovrebbe essere un fascio di luce dato a un uomo per esplorare ogni cosa, ma in modo tutto particolare le cose più lontane da sé. L’istruzione tende invece a essere un riflettore puntato interamente su sé stesso. Qualche miglioramento si potrà ottenere puntando riflettori altrettanto vividi, e forse volgari, su un gran numero di altre persone pure. Ma l’unico rimedio definitivo è spegnere le luci della ribalta e lasciargli scorgere le stelle.
IL ROMANZO DI UN FURFANTE
Fu Thackeray, mi pare, in qualche punto dei vertiginosi labirinti dei suoi Roundabout Papers, a fare un’osservazione che getta un po’ di luce sulle mode letterarie e sulla sorte del Peregrine Pickle di Smollett. Egli descrisse con grande vivacità il fervore che provava da ragazzo per i romanzi di Waverley; e come quei grandi romanzi riempissero la fanciullezza di coloro che, come lui, erano destinati a fare la letteratura di quell’epoca oltremodo romantica che in Inghilterra chiamiamo l’età vittoriana. Vi aggiunge un commento interessante di questo tenore: «I nostri padri usavano parlarci del Peregrine Pickle, dicendoci (quei vecchi birbanti astuti) che era un divertimento sopraffino. Ma credo di esserne rimasto piuttosto sconcertato».
Questo, temo, potrebbe essere l’effetto immediato su molti, sia del tempo di Thackeray sia perfino del nostro, là dove esso ha ereditato la grande tradizione letteraria che molti appresero in gioventù da Thackeray, e che Thackeray apprese in gioventù da Scott. La maggior parte di coloro che crebbero sotto tali modelli di narrativa, come chi qui scrive, saranno forse propensi a dire, sulle prime, che trovano il romanzo di Smollett piuttosto sconcertante. Non del tutto sconcertante come alcuni dei romanzi più moderni, s’intende. Ma molti sembrano avere un singolare criterio letterario, per cui amano essere sconcertati da un libro nuovo, ma detestano essere sconcertati da uno vecchio. Come mostrerò tra poco, ciò dipende in gran parte dal fatto che il libro nuovo non è tanto nuovo quanto pretende di essere. E il libro vecchio non è poi tanto vecchio, per come procedono le reali tappe della storia. In breve, la vera morale di tutte queste cose è la sorprendente rapidità con cui gli umori e i modelli cambiano e tornano a cambiare; spesso ritornando dalla terza condizione alla prima. Non c’è nulla di così sconcertante come la rapidità con cui i nuovi metodi letterari si irrigidiscono, se non la fragilità con cui si spezzano. Ogni viaggiatore che svolta l’angolo pensa che esso lo condurrà su una diritta strada di progresso; ma in realtà lo conduce, in una decina di minuti, a un altro angolo che svolta in un’altra strada altrettanto tortuosa. Il punto riguardo a un libro come il Peregrine Pickle può essere fissato con discreta precisione, considerando quali siano i mutamenti che lo separavano da Thackeray, o che separano Thackeray da noi.
In quella breve frase dei Roundabout Papers vi sono, tanto per cominciare, alcuni punti interessanti e persino divertenti. Per esempio, ci viene sempre detto che il genitore vittoriano, o, ancor di più, il genitore del primo Ottocento, fosse un puritano che proibiva alla propria famiglia tanto le forme oziose quanto quelle sconvenienti della letteratura leggera; un Padre Severo che gravava pesantemente perfino sulle comuni storie d’amore o sui drammi romantici. Persino un tipo così settecentesco come Macaulay identificava l’opinione della maggior parte dei genitori sobri e responsabili con un genitore tanto straordinario quanto Sir Anthony Absolute nella commedia. «Una biblioteca circolante è un sempreverde albero della diabolica conoscenza». Persino un moderno tanto immerso nel Settecento come il signor Max Beerbohm ha descritto il tipico papà di una generazione che ben poteva essere quella del papà di Thackeray come una persona tetra e ponderosa che non parlava ai figli d’altro che dell’Inferno. Certamente quel piccolo scorcio, tratto dagli stessi saggi di Thackeray, potrebbe indurre a intuire che in tutto ciò c’è qualcosa che non quadra. È difficile immaginare il papà puritano, che comunemente parlava dell’Inferno, concludere con la raccomandazione di leggere il Peregrine Pickle. È difficile supporre che una schiatta di Sir Anthony Absolute, che disapprovavano tutti i romanzi, si fossero dati la pena di scegliere questo romanzo, fra tutti i romanzi della terra, con il pretesto che era «un divertimento sopraffino». Il genitore doveva essere davvero un vecchio birbante astuto, se davvero mise il Peregrine Pickle sotto gli occhi di un ragazzino, la cui testa era piena di ideali cavallereschi, come quelli di Quentin Durward e di Ivanhoe.
La verità è che gli elementi erano troppo mescolati, e, soprattutto, le mode troppo fuggevoli, per una qualsiasi di queste generalizzazioni. Gli uomini che perdono le tradizioni si abbandonano alle convenzioni; ma le convenzioni sono più effimere delle mode. C’erano papà che si sarebbero quasi scandalizzati altrettanto nel vedere le figlie leggere Pride and Prejudice quanto nel vederle leggere il Peregrine Pickle. Ma erano i papà e non i nonni. C’era una sorta di famiglia in cui l’Inferno era l’argomento di chiacchiera più brillante; ma non era la famiglia all’antica, bensì piuttosto quella alla moda nuova. Venne con i metodisti, che erano considerati innovatori e ribelli. Quell’episodio di estrema severità, che fu l’inizio della narrativa vittoriana altamente espurgata, non ha bisogno di essere qui ricondotto alle sue cause storiche. In linea di massima, esso derivò dal rapido incremento di ricchezza e potere fra i nonconformisti del nord, che posero il veto sulla schiettezza tanto della vecchia piccola nobiltà quanto del vecchio contadinato del sud. Il punto qui è che l’opera di questi puritani, del Lancashire o dello Yorkshire, fu compiuta così rapidamente che gli uomini dimenticarono quanto fosse recente. Tutto ciò va compreso prima che chiunque, guardando indietro attraverso l’Ottocento, possa rendere giustizia all’opera di Smollett. Il punto è che non solo i cambiamenti vennero, ma ogni generazione li accettò come se fossero sempre stati immutabili. Così, nel caso appena menzionato, Thackeray cominciò a scrivere romanzi molto tempo dopo Dickens; era ancora un artista, o studente d’arte, quando si offrì di illustrare il Pickwick. Dickens, nel flusso della popolarità che seguì il Pickwick, aveva già accettato e reso popolari quelle che noi chiamiamo le convenzioni vittoriane. Ciò è stato espresso in modo alquanto brusco dal signor Aldous Huxley quando disse che uno scrittore come Dickens scrive come se fosse un bambino, mentre uno scrittore come Smollett scrive come se fosse un uomo fatto. Ma in verità c’è un legame considerevole fra uno scrittore come Smollett e uno scrittore come Aldous Huxley. Poiché la strada ha compiuto un’altra brusca svolta all’indietro; e l’intermezzo dell’innocenza vittoriana è di nuovo fuori vista. Ce n’è un esempio, che domina e in gran parte spiega l’intera vicenda del Peregrine Pickle.
When Thackeray called Vanity Fair “a novel without a hero”, or even when he made the relatively realistic Pendennis a novel with a rather unheroic hero, he was doubtless by that time so accustomed to Victorian fiction as to feel that he was doing something new, and even “cynical”. For Victorian fiction had already returned to the old romantic idea that the hero should be heroic, even if it did not understand him so well as did the old romances. Nicholas Nickleby vanquishes Squeers as St. George vanquishes the dragon; and John Ridd is a knight without fear or reproach, like Ivanhoe. But in fact Thackeray was only slightly reacting towards what had been universal in the time of that sly old boy, his papa.
All novels like Peregrine Pickle, all novels up to the time of Pickwick, were written frankly on a far more cynical convention: that the hero should not be heroic. The enterprising Mr. Pickle is certainly not heroic. He is many things that are good; not only brave, but often warm-hearted and considerate; and, above all, capable of recognising better men than himself. But, for the rest, by Victorian and even by normal standards, he is simply a coarse and rapacious rascal; nor does Smollett really pretend that he is anything else. This tendency to follow with delight the tricks and triumphs of somebody little better than a swindler comes from the historical origin of this type of story, which began in what is called the picaresque novel. It is the romance of a wanderer, apt to turn from the romance of a peddler to that of a highway robber. It is a curious coincidence that Smollett translated Gil Blas, in which this new cynical romance made its first triumph; and also translated Don Quixote, in which the road was cleared for it by the rout of the old romances which had made their heroes impossibly heroic. But about this sort of rambling tale, of the Romance of a Rascal, there are certain modern misunderstandings to be avoided. It would be complete misunderstanding of men like Tobias Smollett to suppose that because the heroes are immoral the authors are even unmoral. It is a peculiar characteristic of all that stalwart school, which represented this picaresque element in England that they do believe in heroism for anybody except heroes. Both in Fielding and Smollett and others we find a sort of fixed habit of thought, by which virtue is represented, and is even preached, and is often preached vehemently and in terms of authority; but never by the principal character, who is a young man of the world apparently not expected either to preach it or to practise it. Parson Adams is a serious picture of a good man, and Joseph Andrews is only a bad joke; but Joseph gives his name to the book. Fielding is more concerned with Tom Jones than with Alworthy; but be agrees with Mr. Alworthy and not with Tom Jones. And if anyone wishes to note exactly how this habit expresses itself in Smollett, let him turn to the typical scene in which Peregrine Pickle provokes a duel with Mr. Gauntlet. By all possible standards Peregrine is to behave like a vulgar and low-minded cad, actually sneering at the poverty of the soldier whom he has insulted, and being ignominiously defeated by the man he has so coarsely despised. Certainly no Victorian romancer would have dragged his hero through the mud of such a meeting. And yet the whole incident brings out in glowing colours all that is really good and lovable about Peregrine Pickle. He does vividly realise that the other man is more virtuous than himself; he acts as impetuously on the moral as on the immoral impulse;. he apologises after defeat, which is more difficult than apologising before it. In other words, Mr. Gauntlet, like Parson Adams, stands for something fixed and recognised; a virtue which the other characters venerate even while they violate. In this incident Peregrine is represented in the course of an hour or so as behaving almost incredibly badly and then almost incredibly well; and yet it is quite credible. Why do we thus feel that there is something solid in it after all? First, no doubt, because Smollett was a real novelist, and the character of Peregrine Pickle was a real character. He does convey what later sentiment would have called the contradiction: that Peregrine was a scoundrel, but a warm-hearted scoundrel; that lie was very near to being a swindler, but always an impetuous swindler. But it is due, almost as much, to the sense of firmness produced by the fact that vice and virtue are still treated as facts. Our sense of sincerity is founded on the fact that Tobias Smollett, as well as Peregrine Pickle, did really believe in right and wrong, and thought the principal character wrong and the secondary character right.
It is here that we find the chief difference between old writers like Smollett and many modern writers who set themselves successfully to produce the same convincing smell of dirt, the same unmistakable ugliness in the details of life, the same slippery and sometimes slimy irresponsibility about sex, the same heroic persistency in avoiding heroism. The difference is that Smollett’s hero, or villain, does know exactly where he is in the moral world, even if it is where he ought not to be. The modern adventurer of the same type occupies all his adventures in trying to discover where he is. He is not so much breaking laws with bravery and cunning, as trying to learn the laws, with constant bewilderment and despair. Virtue does not rebuke him; the best that can be said for him is that vice generally bores him. Therefore he is not wholly successful in copying the older writers in their two gifts of lucidity and grossness; because he lacks the third angle of the triangle: their confidence.
Quando Thackeray definì Vanity Fair «un romanzo senza eroe», o anche quando fece del relativamente realistico Pendennis un romanzo con un eroe piuttosto poco eroico, era ormai a quel tempo, senza dubbio, così avvezzo alla narrativa vittoriana da sentire di fare qualcosa di nuovo, e persino di «cinico». Poiché la narrativa vittoriana era già tornata alla vecchia idea romantica che l’eroe dovesse essere eroico, anche se non lo comprendeva così bene come lo comprendevano i vecchi romanzi. Nicholas Nickleby sconfigge Squeers come san Giorgio sconfigge il drago; e John Ridd è un cavaliere senza paura e senza macchia, come Ivanhoe. Ma in realtà Thackeray non faceva che reagire lievemente verso ciò che era stato universale ai tempi di quel vecchio birbante astuto, suo papà.
Tutti i romanzi come il Peregrine Pickle, tutti i romanzi fino al tempo del Pickwick, erano scritti apertamente su una convenzione assai più cinica: che l’eroe non dovesse essere eroico. L’intraprendente signor Pickle non è certo eroico. È molte cose che sono buone; non solo coraggioso, ma spesso cordiale e premuroso; e, soprattutto, capace di riconoscere uomini migliori di sé. Ma, per il resto, secondo gli standard vittoriani e persino secondo gli standard normali, egli è semplicemente un furfante rozzo e rapace; né Smollett pretende davvero che sia qualcos’altro. Questa tendenza a seguire con diletto le astuzie e i trionfi di qualcuno poco migliore di un imbroglione deriva dall’origine storica di questo tipo di racconto, che ebbe inizio in ciò che si chiama il romanzo picaresco. È il romanzo di un vagabondo, incline a passare dal romanzo di un venditore ambulante a quello di un brigante di strada. È una curiosa coincidenza che Smollett tradusse il Gil Blas, in cui questo nuovo romanzo cinico riportò il suo primo trionfo; e tradusse anche il Don Quixote, in cui la strada gli fu spianata dalla disfatta dei vecchi romanzi che avevano reso i loro eroi impossibilmente eroici. Ma riguardo a questa sorta di racconto vagabondo, il Romanzo di un Furfante, ci sono certi moderni fraintendimenti da evitare. Sarebbe un completo fraintendimento di uomini come Tobias Smollett supporre che, poiché gli eroi sono immorali, gli autori siano addirittura amorali. È una peculiare caratteristica di tutta quella robusta scuola, che rappresentò questo elemento picaresco in Inghilterra, il credere nell’eroismo per chiunque tranne che per gli eroi. Sia in Fielding sia in Smollett e in altri troviamo una sorta di fissa abitudine di pensiero, per cui la virtù viene rappresentata, e persino predicata, e spesso predicata con veemenza e in termini d’autorità; ma mai dal personaggio principale, che è un giovane uomo di mondo dal quale, a quanto pare, non ci si aspetta né che la predichi né che la pratichi. Il parroco Adams è un serio ritratto di un uomo buono, e Joseph Andrews non è che uno scherzo di cattivo gusto; eppure è Joseph a dare il nome al libro. Fielding si occupa più di Tom Jones che di Alworthy; ma dà ragione al signor Alworthy e non a Tom Jones. E se qualcuno desidera notare esattamente come questa abitudine si esprima in Smollett, si volga alla scena tipica in cui Peregrine Pickle provoca un duello con il signor Gauntlet. Secondo ogni possibile criterio, Peregrine si comporta come un cafone volgare e di animo basso, che addirittura sogghigna sulla povertà del soldato che ha insultato, e che viene ignominiosamente sconfitto dall’uomo che ha così rozzamente disprezzato. Certamente nessun narratore vittoriano avrebbe trascinato il proprio eroe nel fango di un simile incontro. Eppure l’intero episodio fa risaltare a tinte splendenti tutto ciò che di veramente buono e amabile c’è in Peregrine Pickle. Egli si rende vividamente conto che l’altro è più virtuoso di lui; agisce con la stessa impetuosità sull’impulso morale come su quello immorale; si scusa dopo la sconfitta, il che è più difficile che scusarsi prima di essa. In altre parole, il signor Gauntlet, come il parroco Adams, sta per qualcosa di fisso e riconosciuto; una virtù che gli altri personaggi venerano anche mentre la violano. In questo episodio Peregrine è rappresentato, nell’arco di un’ora circa, mentre si comporta in modo quasi incredibilmente cattivo e poi quasi incredibilmente bene; eppure la cosa è del tutto credibile. Perché sentiamo così che, dopotutto, c’è qualcosa di solido in essa? Anzitutto, senza dubbio, perché Smollett era un vero romanziere, e il carattere di Peregrine Pickle era un carattere reale. Egli sa rendere ciò che il sentimento posteriore avrebbe chiamato la contraddizione: che Peregrine era un mascalzone, ma un mascalzone dal cuore caldo; che era quanto mai vicino a essere un imbroglione, ma sempre un imbroglione impetuoso. Ma ciò è dovuto, quasi altrettanto, al senso di fermezza prodotto dal fatto che il vizio e la virtù sono ancora trattati come fatti. Il nostro senso di sincerità si fonda sul fatto che Tobias Smollett, non meno di Peregrine Pickle, credeva davvero nel giusto e nell’ingiusto, e riteneva il personaggio principale nel torto e il personaggio secondario nel giusto.
È qui che troviamo la principale differenza fra i vecchi scrittori come Smollett e molti scrittori moderni che si adoperano con successo a produrre lo stesso convincente lezzo di sudiciume, la stessa inconfondibile bruttezza nei particolari della vita, la stessa sdrucciolevole e talora viscida irresponsabilità in fatto di sesso, la stessa eroica ostinazione nell’evitare l’eroismo. La differenza è che l’eroe, o cattivo, di Smollett sa esattamente dove si trova nel mondo morale, anche se è là dove non dovrebbe trovarsi. L’avventuriero moderno dello stesso tipo impiega tutte le sue avventure nel tentare di scoprire dove si trova. Egli non tanto infrange le leggi con audacia e astuzia, quanto cerca di apprendere le leggi, con perpetuo sconcerto e disperazione. La virtù non lo rimprovera; il meglio che si possa dire di lui è che il vizio, in genere, lo annoia. Perciò egli non riesce del tutto a imitare gli scrittori più antichi nei loro due doni di lucidità e di crudezza; perché gli manca il terzo angolo del triangolo: la loro sicurezza.
Considered as a series of chapters, Peregrine Pickle is simply a chapter of accidents. Curiously enough the splash it made in its own day, especially in the sparkling world of wit and fashion, was almost entirely due to what almost anybody would now call the dullest part of the book. The insertion called “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” was supposed to have some scandalous allusiveness to aristocratic society at the time; but it is not typical of the author, or even of the book. Nor can we in practice class this patchy and parenthetical style with the similar irregularity of a book like Pickwick. Most people, at least most mature people, have read Pickwick. Comparatively few, even among the most aged people, have read Peregrine Pickle. There cannot be very many sly old boys still going about the street, and advising modern youth to read it and find it capital fun. To many it must now be introduced as a new book rather than an old one; and the method of approach is sharply divergent. In writing of Dickens, we are writing for our fellow Dickensians, and can prove any point or illustrate any theory by examples they know as well as we. I do not think it is unfair to say that if I were to begin by referring the average reader to the well-known attitude of Mr. Metaphor, or the incident of Mr. Hornbeck, he would hardly be so suddenly illumined as by a reference to Mr. Stiggins or Mr. Weller. In cases like this, where an historic work by a man of genius is not now widely popular, or in immediate contact with the reading public, the cause and the problem can almost always be found in certain changes of taste which, rapid as they are, do correspond largely to changes of ideas. A man who opens Peregrine Pickle must not expect what he gets from a good Victorian novel, or a good modern novel; and only by some explanation of principles can he ever discover that it may contain things quite as good. It is well, therefore, to emphasise some general qualities that are even better. The novel of Smollett’s time was better than the novel of the Victorian time, in so far as it recognised more clearly that good and evil exist and are entangled even in the same man. The novel of Smollett’s time was better than the novel of our own time, in so far as it recognised that, even when they are entangled in the same man, they can still be distinguished and are very different, and at war till death.
Considerato come una serie di capitoli, il Peregrine Pickle è semplicemente un capitolo di incidenti. Curiosamente, il clamore che suscitò ai suoi tempi, specialmente nel brillante mondo dello spirito e della moda, fu quasi interamente dovuto a quella che oggi quasi chiunque definirebbe la parte più noiosa del libro. L’inserto intitolato «Memorie di una dama di rango» si supponeva contenesse qualche scandalosa allusione alla società aristocratica del tempo; ma non è tipico dell’autore, né tantomeno del libro. Né possiamo in pratica classificare questo stile disuguale e parentetico con la simile irregolarità di un libro come il Pickwick. La maggior parte delle persone, o almeno la maggior parte delle persone mature, ha letto il Pickwick. Relativamente poche, anche fra le persone più attempate, hanno letto il Peregrine Pickle. Non possono esserci molti vecchi birbanti astuti ancora in giro per le strade, a consigliare alla gioventù moderna di leggerlo e di trovarlo un divertimento sopraffino. A molti esso dev’essere ormai presentato come un libro nuovo piuttosto che come uno vecchio; e il metodo di approccio è nettamente divergente. Scrivendo di Dickens, scriviamo per i nostri compagni dickensiani, e possiamo dimostrare qualsiasi tesi o illustrare qualsiasi teoria con esempi che essi conoscono altrettanto bene di noi. Non credo sia ingiusto dire che se cominciassi col rimandare il lettore medio al ben noto atteggiamento del signor Metaphor, o all’episodio del signor Hornbeck, egli difficilmente ne sarebbe illuminato così di colpo come da un riferimento al signor Stiggins o al signor Weller. In casi come questo, in cui un’opera storica di un uomo di genio non è oggi largamente popolare, né in contatto immediato con il pubblico dei lettori, la causa e il problema possono quasi sempre trovarsi in certi mutamenti del gusto che, per rapidi che siano, corrispondono in gran parte a mutamenti di idee. Chi apre il Peregrine Pickle non deve aspettarsi ciò che trae da un buon romanzo vittoriano, o da un buon romanzo moderno; e solo attraverso una qualche spiegazione di principi potrà mai scoprire che esso può contenere cose altrettanto buone. È bene, dunque, mettere in risalto alcune qualità generali che sono persino migliori. Il romanzo del tempo di Smollett era migliore del romanzo del tempo vittoriano, in quanto riconosceva più chiaramente che il bene e il male esistono e sono intrecciati anche in uno stesso uomo. Il romanzo del tempo di Smollett era migliore del romanzo del nostro tempo, in quanto riconosceva che, anche quando sono intrecciati in uno stesso uomo, essi possono pur sempre essere distinti e sono assai diversi, e in guerra fino alla morte.
PAYING FOR PATRIOTISM
Somebody was recently remonstrating with me in connection with certain remarks that I have made touching the history of English misgovernment in Ireland. The criticism, like many others, was to the effect that these are only old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago; that the present generation is not responsible for them; that there is, as the critic said, no way in which he or I could have assisted or prevented them; that if anyone was to blame, he had gone to his account; and we are not to blame at all. There was mingled with his protest, I think, a certain suggestion that an Englishman is lacking in patriotism when he resurrects such corpses in order to connect them with crime.
Now the queer thing is this: that I think it is I who am standing up for the principle of patriotism; and I think it is he who is denying it. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few people left, of my own sort and calling, who do still believe in patriotism; just as I am among the few who do still believe in democracy. Both these ideas, were exaggerated extravagantly and, what is worse, erroneously, or entirely in the wrong way, during the nineteenth century; but the reaction against them today is very strong, especially among the intellectuals. But I do believe that patriotism rests on a psychological truth; a social sympathy with those of our own sort, whereby we see our own potential acts in them; and understand their history from within. But if there truly be such a thing as a nation, that truth is a two-edged sword, and we must let it out both ways.
Therefore I answer my critic thus. It is quite true that it was not I, G. K. Chesterton, who pulled the beard of an Irish chieftain by way of social introduction; it was John Plantagenet, afterwards King John; and I was not present. It was not I, but a much more distinguished literary gent, named Edmund Spenser, who concluded on the whole that the Irish had better be exterminated like vipers; nor did he even ask my advice on so vital a point. I never stuck a pike through an Irish lady for fun, after the siege of Drogheda, as did the God-fearing Puritan soldiers of Oliver Cromwell. Nobody can find anything in my handwriting that contributes to the original drafting of the Penal Laws; and it is a complete mistake to suppose that I was called to the Privy Council when it decided upon the treacherous breaking of the Treaty of Limerick. I never put a pitchcap on an Irish rebel in my life; and there was not a single one of the thousand floggings of ‘98 which I inflicted or even ordered. If that is what is meant, it is not very difficult to see that it is quite true.
But it is equally true that I did not ride with Chaucer to Canterbury, and give him a few intelligent hints for the best passages in The Canterbury Tales. It is equally true that there was a large and lamentable gap in the company seated at the Mermaid; that scarcely a word of Shakespeare’s most poetical passages was actually contributed by me; that I did not whisper to him the word “incarnadine” when he was hesitating after “multitudinous seas”; that I entirely missed the opportunity of suggesting that Hamlet would be effectively ended by the stormy entrance of Fortinbras. Nay, aged and infirm as I am, it were vain for me to pretend that I lost a leg at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that I am old enough to have seen (as I should like to have seen), ablaze with stars upon the deck of death, the frail figure and the elvish face of the noblest sailor of history.
Yet I propose to go on being proud of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Nelson; to feel that the poets did indeed love the language that I love and that the sailor felt something of what we also feel for the sea. But if we accept this mystical corporate being, this larger self, we must accept it for good and ill. If we boast of our best, we must repent of our worst. Otherwise patriotism will be a very poor thing indeed.
PAGARE IL PATRIOTTISMO
Qualcuno, di recente, mi ha rivolto rimostranze a proposito di certe osservazioni che avevo fatto toccando la storia del malgoverno inglese in Irlanda. La critica, come tante altre, si riduceva a questo: che si tratta soltanto di vecchie e infelici faccende lontane, di battaglie combattute chissà quando; che la generazione presente non ne è responsabile; che non v’era, come diceva il mio critico, alcun modo in cui lui o io avremmo potuto favorirle o impedirle; che, se qualcuno era da biasimare, costui era ormai andato a rendere conto di sé; e che noi non abbiamo colpa alcuna. Alla sua protesta, credo, si mescolava una certa insinuazione: che un inglese difetti di patriottismo quando riesuma simili cadaveri per ricollegarli a un delitto.
Ora, la cosa curiosa è questa: che sono io, a mio giudizio, a tener alto il principio del patriottismo; ed è lui, a mio giudizio, a rinnegarlo. In verità sono uno dei pochi rimasti, della mia specie e del mio mestiere, che credano ancora nel patriottismo; così come sono tra i pochi che credano ancora nella democrazia. Entrambe queste idee furono esagerate a dismisura e, quel che è peggio, in modo erroneo, o del tutto per il verso sbagliato, durante il diciannovesimo secolo; ma oggi la reazione contro di esse è fortissima, specie tra gli intellettuali. Io però credo davvero che il patriottismo poggi su una verità psicologica: una simpatia sociale verso quelli della nostra stessa specie, per cui scorgiamo in loro i nostri atti possibili, e ne comprendiamo la storia dal di dentro. Ma se davvero esiste una cosa come una nazione, quella verità è una spada a doppio taglio, e dobbiamo lasciarla colpire da entrambe le parti.
Rispondo dunque così al mio critico. È verissimo che non fui io, G. K. Chesterton, a tirare la barba a un capo irlandese a mo’ di presentazione mondana; fu Giovanni Plantageneto, poi re Giovanni; e io non ero presente. Non fui io, ma un ben più illustre signore delle lettere, di nome Edmund Spenser, a concludere in sostanza che gli irlandesi era meglio sterminarli come vipere; né egli chiese mai il mio parere su un punto tanto vitale. Non trafissi mai con una picca, per diletto, una dama irlandese, dopo l’assedio di Drogheda, come fecero i timorati soldati puritani di Oliver Cromwell. Nessuno può trovare, di mia mano, un solo rigo che abbia contribuito alla prima stesura delle Leggi Penali; ed è un errore bell’e buono supporre che fossi convocato al Consiglio della Corona quando esso deliberò la sleale rottura del Trattato di Limerick. Non calai mai in vita mia un berretto di pece sul capo di un ribelle irlandese; e non vi fu, delle mille fustigazioni del ‘98, una sola che io abbia inflitta o anche soltanto ordinata. Se è questo che si vuol dire, non è troppo difficile vedere che è verissimo.
Ma è altrettanto vero che non cavalcai con Chaucer fino a Canterbury, per offrirgli qualche spunto intelligente sui passi migliori dei Canterbury Tales. È altrettanto vero che vi era un ampio e deplorevole vuoto nella brigata seduta alla Mermaid; che a malapena una parola dei passi più poetici di Shakespeare fu davvero opera mia; che non gli sussurrai io la parola «incarnadine» mentre esitava dopo «multitudinous seas»; che mancai del tutto l’occasione di suggerire che l’Amleto si sarebbe chiuso con grande effetto per l’irruzione tempestosa di Fortebraccio. Anzi, vecchio e malfermo come sono, sarebbe vano fingere che io abbia perduto una gamba nella battaglia di Trafalgar, o che sia tanto attempato da aver veduto (come avrei desiderato vedere), avvampante di stelle sul ponte della morte, la fragile figura e il volto d’elfo del più nobile marinaio della storia.
Eppure intendo continuare a essere fiero di Chaucer, di Shakespeare e di Nelson; a sentire che i poeti amarono davvero la lingua che io amo, e che il marinaio provò qualcosa di ciò che anche noi proviamo per il mare. Ma se accettiamo questo mistico essere collettivo, questo io più grande, dobbiamo accettarlo nel bene e nel male. Se ci vantiamo del nostro meglio, dobbiamo pentirci del nostro peggio. Altrimenti il patriottismo sarà davvero cosa assai meschina.
THE PANTOMIME
Mr. Maurice Baring, the chief Puppet-Master of the Puppet-Show of Memory, has included in a recent reprint, I am glad to see, an item that I have loved long since and lost awhile, in the form of a scene from the old Drury Lane sort of Harlequinade, recast in the manner of the mystical plays of Maeterlinck. It was probably written when Maeterlinck was very much the fashion, and when people had long been saying that the Harlequinade was hopelessly old-fashioned. In one sense it would be difficult to say which of the two is more old-fashioned now. But, to judge by current criticism and conversation, there are many who remember Pantaloon and Harlequin who hardly even remember Pélleas and Mélisande. It is a queer thing to note the extent to which the world has become silent about Maeterlinck; though it may be the more impressive to the remaining followers of so eloquent an admirer of silence. Whatever be the cause, it certainly was not that his work was devoid of a very individual imaginative quality. Personally, I should guess that he had shared the fate of many modern attempts to refound mysticism on something less real rather than something more real than this world. But the matter only arises here in relation to this little literary jest about the Pantomime, which I always felt to be one of Mr. Baring’s most charming fancies. Of course it is a very good burlesque of Maeterlinck; it is also in a sense a very good burlesque of the Pantomime; and the latter is the more delicate achievement. Every healthy person wishes to make fun of a serious thing; but it is generally almost impossible to make fun of a funny thing. But in this case the notion of fun or burlesque must not be confused in either case with any idea of hostility, or even of satire. Parody does not consist merely of contrast; at its best it rather consists of a superficial contrast covering a substantial congruity. The bitter sort of burlesque may exist, and have a right to exist; but it is doubtful whether in this particular form the bitterest is the best. The one sort of parodist will naturally parody the sort of style he dislikes. But the other sort of parodist will always prefer to parody the style he likes. I remember in my boyhood, when Swinburne was our (rather too bubbly) champagne, I for one wrote almost as many conscious travesties of Swinburne as unconscious copies of him.
Now in this case of the Pantomime the paradox has a sort of moral. For I know that the real reason why I return with unwearied joy to Mr. Baring’s little Maeterlinckian Harlequinade is because the atmosphere of the harlequinade really was for me, if not exactly Maeterlinckian, at least in some mysterious sense mystical. I need not dwell on the points in the parody which were witty considered as contrasts as well as coincidences. The policeman repeats at intervals, like the tolling of a funeral bell (a lost and wandering bell attached to no church and uttering in its hollow throat an awful agnosticism), “It was not on my beat.” The Pantaloon, one of the shivering old men of Maeterlinck, babbles not of green fields but of grey and ghostly sausages, as of things he will never find, or is not certain that he ever did find. But my point here is that, in spite of the comic contrast between the hilarity of the Pantomime and the hopelessness of the Maeterlinckian atmosphere, there really is something that, for me at least, melts the two into a sort of mystical unity; so that the top-heavy house of the Harlequinade is even here like my home. For I am quite certain, as a fact of psychology, that I did even in childhood regard the knockabout part of the Pantomime with its pokers and sausages, as being none the less a poetical part of the Pantomime; and as unmistakably within the frontiers of fairyland as the palace of the Fairy Queen. Never on earthly anvil, never in earthly fireplace, did that red poker gleam: never those clattering milkcans brim with an earthly cream. The Policeman was perfectly right about both scenes and in both senses. He was not on his beat. He was a stray and estranged policeman; a policeman stolen by the fairies; a constable wandering far away from his constabulary duties, if he ever had any. The joke depended on the very Victorian accident that the costume of a London policeman seemed both commonplace and comic; and yet, although he was comic, he was not really commonplace. He was not merely befooled but bewitched; and his blue uniform revisited the glimpses of a blue moon. Still, it is curious to reflect how completely different the whole drama would have seemed if he had been any sort of foreign gendarme, with a cocked hat and a sword.
Now my interest in the matter is this; that I know many will say that this sense of glamour is an effect of distance, like the colour of blue hills or crimson clouds; and that in this romantic aspect it is only a puppet-show of memory. They would say that I saw it in this mystical manner through the intervening veils of time, through the mists of Maeterlinck, through the mockeries of Mr. Baring, and, above all, through that depth of delicate melancholy with which the remote past is remembered. But I am certain that this is not so. Apart from the fact that the memory of childish joys does not make me melancholy (it is perhaps a fine shade of theology) and apart from the fact that I suspect that Mr. Baring himself remembers the thing very much as I do, I am quite sure that I am remembering a reality that was real then as well as now. You could as soon persuade me that the taste of toffee was an illusion that only came to me in later years, or that I think I liked roast chestnuts then only because I like them now, as convince me that I did not have, even as a child, an overwhelming impression that this farcical world was fantastic, not merely in the sense of being comic, but also in the sense of being mystic. Though the scene might superficially seem completely constructed out of objects made as much as possible prosaic, I had an instant inward certainty that they were all poetic. The sky above those staggering chimneys was not the sky above the chimneys in the street outside; its stars would have been strange stars; for I had looked round another corner of the cosmos. To wander in the streets of that strange town would have been as unearthly an experience as to wander in the Blue Forest round Bluebeard’s Sapphire Palace, or along the Golden Orange-Groves in the gardens of Prester John. Not verbally, but quite vividly, I knew then, exactly as I know now, that there is something mysterious and perhaps more than mortal about the power and call of imagination. I do not think this early experience has been quite rightly understood, even by those modern writers who have written the most charming and fanciful studies of childhood; and I am not so presumptuous as to think that I can scientifically succeed where I think they have somehow vaguely failed. But I have often fancied that it might be worth while to set down a few notes or queries about this difficult and distant impression. For one thing, the ordinary phrases used about childish fancies often strike me as missing the mark, and being in some subtle way, quite misleading. For instance, there is the very popular phrase, “Make-believe.” This seems to imply that the mind makes itself believe something; or else that it first makes something and then forces itself to believe in it, or to believe something about it. I do not think there is even this slight crack of falsity in the crystal clearness and directness of the child’s vision of a fairy-palace— or a fairy-policeman. In one sense the child believes much less, and in another much more than that. I do not think the child is deceived; or that he attempts for a moment to deceive himself. I think he instantly asserts his direct and divine right to enjoy beauty; that he steps straight into his own lawful kingdom of imagination, without any quibbles or questions such as arise afterwards out of false moralities and philosophies, touching the nature of falsehood and truth. In other words, I believe that the child has inside his head a pretty correct and complete definition of the whole nature and function of art; with the one addition that he is quite incapable of saying, even to himself, a single word on the subject. Would that many other professors of aesthetics were under a similar limitation. Anyhow, he does not say to himself, “This is a real street, in which mother could go shopping.” He does not say to himself, ” This is an exact realistic copy of a real street, to be admired for its technical correctness.” Neither does he say, “This is an unreal street, and I am drugging and deceiving my powerful mind with something that is a mere illusion.” Neither does he say, “This is only a story, and nurse says it is very naughty to tell stories.” If he says anything, he only says what was said by those men who saw the white blaze of the Transfiguration, “It is well for us to be here.”
LA PANTOMIMA
Il signor Maurice Baring, Burattinaio in capo del Teatro di Burattini della Memoria, ha incluso, con mia grande gioia, in una recente ristampa, un pezzo che avevo amato tanto tempo fa e poi smarrito per un po’: si tratta di una scena della vecchia arlecchinata sul genere di Drury Lane, rifusa alla maniera dei drammi mistici di Maeterlinck. Fu probabilmente scritta quando Maeterlinck era di gran moda, e quando da tempo si andava dicendo che l’arlecchinata era irrimediabilmente antiquata. In un certo senso sarebbe difficile stabilire quale delle due appaia oggi più antiquata. Ma, a giudicare dalla critica e dalle conversazioni correnti, sono molti coloro che ricordano Pantalone e Arlecchino a stento ricordando persino Pelléas e Mélisande. È una cosa curiosa notare fino a che punto il mondo si sia fatto silenzioso intorno a Maeterlinck; anche se ciò può risultare tanto più impressionante ai seguaci superstiti di un così eloquente ammiratore del silenzio. Qualunque ne sia la causa, non fu certo che la sua opera fosse priva di una qualità immaginativa assai personale. Personalmente, direi che egli condivise la sorte di molti tentativi moderni di rifondare il misticismo su qualcosa di meno reale, anziché di più reale, di questo mondo. Ma la questione si affaccia qui soltanto in rapporto a questo piccolo scherzo letterario intorno alla pantomima, che ho sempre giudicato una delle più deliziose fantasie del signor Baring. Naturalmente è un’ottima parodia di Maeterlinck; è anche, in un certo senso, un’ottima parodia della pantomima; e quest’ultima è la conquista più delicata. Ogni persona sana desidera prendersi gioco di una cosa seria; ma è generalmente quasi impossibile prendersi gioco di una cosa buffa. In questo caso, però, l’idea di scherzo o di parodia non va confusa, né nell’uno né nell’altro caso, con alcun sentimento di ostilità, e nemmeno di satira. La parodia non consiste soltanto nel contrasto; al suo meglio, essa consiste piuttosto in un contrasto superficiale che ricopre una sostanziale congruenza. Può esistere il genere amaro di parodia, e ha diritto di esistere; ma è dubbio se, in questa forma particolare, la più amara sia la migliore. L’una specie di parodista parodierà naturalmente lo stile che detesta. Ma l’altra specie di parodista preferirà sempre parodiare lo stile che ama. Ricordo che nella mia fanciullezza, quando Swinburne era il nostro champagne (fin troppo frizzante), scrissi quasi altrettante consapevoli travestimenti di Swinburne quante inconsapevoli imitazioni di lui.
Ora, in questo caso della pantomima, il paradosso ha una sorta di morale. Perché so bene che la vera ragione per cui torno con inesausta gioia alla piccola arlecchinata maeterlinckiana del signor Baring è che l’atmosfera dell’arlecchinata era davvero per me, se non proprio maeterlinckiana, almeno in qualche misterioso senso mistica. Non ho bisogno di soffermarmi sui punti della parodia che erano arguti considerati come contrasti oltre che come coincidenze. Il poliziotto ripete a intervalli, come il rintocco di una campana funebre (una campana perduta e vagabonda, non legata ad alcuna chiesa, che nella sua cavità profonda proferisce un tremendo agnosticismo): «Non era nella mia ronda». Il Pantalone, uno dei vecchi tremanti di Maeterlinck, farfuglia non di verdi prati ma di grigie e spettrali salsicce, come di cose che non troverà mai, o di cui non è certo di aver mai trovato. Ma il mio punto qui è che, malgrado il comico contrasto fra l’ilarità della pantomima e la disperazione dell’atmosfera maeterlinckiana, c’è davvero qualcosa che, per me almeno, fonde le due cose in una sorta di mistica unità; sicché la casa sbilenca dell’arlecchinata è, persino qui, come la mia casa. Perché sono assolutamente certo, come fatto di psicologia, che io, già da bambino, consideravo la parte scapigliata della pantomima, con i suoi attizzatoi e le sue salsicce, come non meno poetica parte della pantomima; e inconfondibilmente entro i confini del paese delle fate, come il palazzo della Regina delle Fate. Mai su incudine terrena, mai in focolare terreno, brillò quell’attizzatoio rosso: mai quei tintinnanti bricchi di latte traboccarono di una crema terrena. Il poliziotto aveva perfettamente ragione riguardo a entrambe le scene e in entrambi i sensi. Non era nella sua ronda. Era un poliziotto sperduto ed estraniato; un poliziotto rapito dalle fate; un agente che vagava lontano dai suoi doveri di pubblica sicurezza, sempre che ne avesse mai avuti. Lo scherzo dipendeva dal fatto tutto vittoriano che l’uniforme di un poliziotto di Londra sembrava insieme comune e comica; eppure, per quanto fosse comico, non era davvero comune. Non era soltanto infinocchiato, ma stregato; e la sua uniforme azzurra rivisitava i barlumi di una luna azzurra. Eppure, è curioso riflettere su quanto interamente diverso sarebbe apparso l’intero dramma se egli fosse stato una qualche specie di gendarme straniero, con il tricorno e la spada.
Ora, il mio interesse per la faccenda è questo: so che molti diranno che questo senso d’incanto è un effetto della distanza, come il colore delle colline azzurre o delle nuvole cremisi; e che, in questo aspetto romantico, non è che un teatrino di burattini della memoria. Direbbero che io lo vedevo in questo modo mistico attraverso i veli interposti del tempo, attraverso le nebbie di Maeterlinck, attraverso gli scherni del signor Baring, e, soprattutto, attraverso quella profondità di delicata malinconia con cui si ricorda il passato remoto. Ma sono certo che non è così. A parte il fatto che il ricordo delle gioie infantili non mi rende malinconico (è forse una sottile sfumatura di teologia), e a parte il fatto che sospetto che il signor Baring stesso ricordi la cosa press’a poco come la ricordo io, sono del tutto sicuro di ricordare una realtà che era reale allora tanto quanto adesso. Potreste persuadermi che il sapore del croccante era un’illusione venutami solo negli anni più tardi, o che io credo di aver amato le caldarroste allora solo perché le amo adesso, con la stessa facilità con cui potreste convincermi che io non ebbi, già da bambino, l’impressione travolgente che quel mondo farsesco fosse fantastico, non soltanto nel senso di essere comico, ma anche nel senso di essere mistico. Per quanto la scena potesse superficialmente sembrare interamente costruita con oggetti resi il più possibile prosaici, io avevo un’istantanea certezza interiore che erano tutti poetici. Il cielo sopra quei comignoli traballanti non era il cielo sopra i comignoli della strada là fuori; le sue stelle sarebbero state stelle estranee; perché io avevo guardato oltre un altro angolo del cosmo. Vagare per le strade di quella strana città sarebbe stata un’esperienza tanto ultraterrena quanto vagare nella Foresta Azzurra intorno al Palazzo di Zaffiro di Barbablù, o lungo i Dorati Aranceti nei giardini del Prete Gianni. Non a parole, ma con perfetta vividezza, io sapevo allora, esattamente come lo so adesso, che c’è qualcosa di misterioso e forse più che mortale nel potere e nel richiamo dell’immaginazione. Non credo che questa esperienza precoce sia stata compresa del tutto rettamente, nemmeno da quegli scrittori moderni che hanno scritto i più deliziosi e fantasiosi studi sull’infanzia; e non sono così presuntuoso da credere di poter riuscire scientificamente là dove essi, mi pare, hanno in qualche modo vagamente fallito. Ma ho spesso pensato che varrebbe la pena di annotare qualche appunto o quesito su questa difficile e lontana impressione. Anzitutto, le frasi ordinarie che si usano a proposito delle fantasie infantili spesso mi colpiscono per come mancano il bersaglio, e per come sono, in qualche modo sottile, del tutto fuorvianti. Per esempio, c’è quella frase molto diffusa: «Far finta». Essa sembra implicare che la mente si costringa a credere qualcosa; oppure che prima fabbrichi qualcosa e poi si forzi a crederci, o a credere qualcosa a suo riguardo. Non credo che vi sia neppure questa lieve incrinatura di falsità nella cristallina limpidezza e immediatezza della visione che il bambino ha di un palazzo fatato — o di un poliziotto fatato. In un senso il bambino crede molto meno, e in un altro molto più di così. Non credo che il bambino sia ingannato; né che tenti per un solo istante di ingannare se stesso. Credo che egli affermi all’istante il proprio diretto e divino diritto di godere della bellezza; che entri dritto nel proprio legittimo regno dell’immaginazione, senza alcuno di quei cavilli o interrogativi che sorgono in seguito da false morali e filosofie, toccanti la natura della falsità e della verità. In altre parole, credo che il bambino abbia nella testa una definizione abbastanza corretta e completa dell’intera natura e funzione dell’arte; con l’unica aggiunta che è del tutto incapace di dire, anche a se stesso, una sola parola in proposito. Volesse il cielo che molti altri professori di estetica fossero soggetti a una simile limitazione. Comunque sia, egli non dice a se stesso: «Questa è una strada vera, in cui la mamma potrebbe andare a far la spesa». Non dice a se stesso: «Questa è una copia realistica esatta di una strada vera, da ammirarsi per la sua correttezza tecnica». E neppure dice: «Questa è una strada irreale, e io sto drogando e ingannando la mia potente mente con qualcosa che è mera illusione». E neppure dice: «Questa è solo una favola, e la bambinaia dice che è molto cattivo raccontare frottole». Se dice qualcosa, dice soltanto ciò che dissero quegli uomini che videro il bianco bagliore della Trasfigurazione: «È bene per noi stare qui».
This is the beginning of all sane art criticism: wonder combined with the complete serenity of the conscience in the acceptance of such wonders. The purity of the child largely consists in its entire absence of morality in the sense of Puritan morality, and all the modern and muddled moralities that have sprung from it, scientific and provincial and equivocal, especially the confusions about different meanings of words like “fact” and “fable” and falsehood. The problem is very close to the real problem about images. A child knows that a doll is not a baby; just as clearly as a real believer knows that a statue of an angel is not an angel. But both know that in both cases the image has the power of both opening and concentrating the imagination. Stevenson, whom I shall always count a fountain of fine inspiration, and certainly a man gifted with the eye that sees the daydreams of childhood in broad daylight, was nevertheless not quite sound on this example, possibly because he was not quite sound on the other. He talks too often of the child having his head in a cloud of confusion and indifference to fact or fancy. I believe that our difficulty with the child has the directly opposite cause. It comes because the child is perfectly clear about the difference, not only between truth and falsehood but between fiction and falsehood. He understands the two essential types of truth: the truth of the mystic, which turns a fact into a truth where it should be turned into a truth, because the alternative is a triviality; and the truth of the martyr, which treats a truth as a fact, where it should be treated as a fact, because the alternative is a lie. In other words, the child knows perfectly well without being told the difference between saying he has seen the policeman cut in two in the pantomime, and saying he has seen his little brother break the jug in the nursery, when he really broke it himself. It is we who have grown confused about these categories, and cannot realise the swiftness and clarity with which the child accepts what we call the convention of art. Looking at the street down which the clown pursues the policeman with a poker he would never dream of saying in the ordinary sense, indeed he would never dream of saying at all, “That is a real street.” But still less would he ever dream of saying, “That is an unreal street.” He has a better understanding of dreams—and visions.
In the case of the Pantomime there is one plain fact which clenches this conviction for me. I know I knew that the scenery and costume were “artificial”, because I deeply rejoiced that they were artificial. I liked the notion that things were made of painted wood or plastered by hand with gold and silver. These were the vestments and ornaments of the ritual; but they were not the rite, still less the revelation. I liked the magic-box called a stage, because there, for some reason, the light that never was on sea or land was on paint and paste-board. But I knew perfectly well that it was paint and paste-board. It would be impossible for anybody not to know that who had a toy-theatre of his own. In the Pantomime of my childhood, with its somewhat simpler scenery, there were tricks of mere stage carpentry which I enjoyed as much as if I were working them myself. There was one way of representing tossing waves, by rank behind rank of escaloped blue walls as groundpieces, moved in opposite directions so that the crests seemed to cross and dance. I knew how it was done, because my father did it himself before my very eyes, in my own toy-theatre at home. But it gave me such ecstasy that even now when I think of it for an instant my heart leaps up like the wave. I knew it was not water, but I knew it was sea; and in that flash of knowledge I had passed far beyond those who suffer the fixed and freezing illusion, uttered by the pessimistic poet, that “the sea’s a lot of water that happens to be there.” In imagination there is no illusion; no, not even an instant of illusion. For no split second even then did I believe that people had cut in two a live man—even if he was only a policeman. If I had believed it, I should have felt very different. What I felt was that it was right; that it was a good and enlarging and inspiriting thing to see; that it was an excellent thing to look down on the strange street where such things could be seen; in short, I could say then, with a quite undivided mind, that it was a very good Christmas present to go to the Pantomime.
READING THE RIDDLE
An infinite number of years ago, when I was the chief weakness of a publisher’s office, I remember that there was issued from that establishment a book of highly modern philosophy: a work of elaborate evolutionary explanation of everything and nothing; a work of the New Theology. It was called “The Great Problem Solved” or some such title. When this book had been out for a few days it began to promise an entirely unexpected success. Booksellers sent to ask about it, travellers came in and asked for it, even the ordinary public stood in a sort of knot outside the door, and sent in their bolder spirits to make inquiries.
Even to the publisher this popularity seemed remarkable; to me (who had dipped into the work, when I should have been otherwise employed) it appeared utterly incredible.
After some little time, however, when they had examined “The Great Problem Solved”, the lesser problem was also solved. We found that people were buying it under the impression that it was a detective story. I do not blame them for their desire, and most certainly I do not blame them for their disappointment. It must have exasperated them, it would certainly infuriate me, to open a book expecting to find a cosy, kindly, human story about a murdered man found in a cupboard, and find instead a lot of dull, bad philosophy about the upward progress and the purer morality. I would rather read any detective book than that book. I would rather spend my time in finding out why a dead man was dead than in slowly comprehending why a certain philosopher had never been alive.
Questo è l’inizio di ogni sana critica d’arte: la meraviglia unita alla completa serenità della coscienza nell’accettazione di simili meraviglie. La purezza del bambino consiste in gran parte nella sua totale assenza di moralità nel senso della moralità puritana, e di tutte le moderne e confuse moralità che ne sono scaturite, scientifiche e provinciali ed equivoche, specialmente le confusioni intorno ai diversi significati di parole come «fatto» e «favola» e falsità. Il problema è assai vicino al vero problema riguardo alle immagini. Un bambino sa che una bambola non è un neonato; con la stessa chiarezza con cui un vero credente sa che la statua di un angelo non è un angelo. Ma entrambi sanno che, in entrambi i casi, l’immagine ha il potere sia di aprire sia di concentrare l’immaginazione. Stevenson, che considererò sempre una fonte di fine ispirazione, e certamente un uomo dotato dell’occhio che vede in pieno giorno i sogni a occhi aperti dell’infanzia, non era tuttavia del tutto attendibile su questo esempio, forse perché non era del tutto attendibile sull’altro. Parla troppo spesso del bambino che avrebbe la testa in una nube di confusione e di indifferenza fra il fatto e la fantasia. Io credo che la nostra difficoltà col bambino abbia la causa diametralmente opposta. Nasce dal fatto che il bambino è perfettamente chiaro sulla differenza, non solo fra verità e falsità, ma fra finzione e falsità. Egli comprende i due tipi essenziali di verità: la verità del mistico, che trasforma un fatto in una verità là dove va trasformato in una verità, perché l’alternativa è una banalità; e la verità del martire, che tratta una verità come un fatto, là dove va trattata come un fatto, perché l’alternativa è una menzogna. In altre parole, il bambino conosce perfettamente bene, senza che glielo si dica, la differenza fra il dire di aver visto il poliziotto tagliato in due nella pantomima e il dire di aver visto il suo fratellino rompere la brocca nella stanza dei bambini, quando in realtà l’ha rotta lui stesso. Siamo noi che ci siamo confusi su queste categorie, e non riusciamo a renderci conto della prontezza e della chiarezza con cui il bambino accetta ciò che noi chiamiamo la convenzione dell’arte. Guardando la strada lungo la quale il pagliaccio insegue il poliziotto con un attizzatoio, egli non si sognerebbe mai di dire, nel senso ordinario — anzi, non si sognerebbe mai di dirlo affatto —: «Quella è una strada vera». Ma ancor meno si sognerebbe mai di dire: «Quella è una strada irreale». Egli ha una migliore comprensione dei sogni — e delle visioni.
Nel caso della pantomima c’è un fatto lampante che suggella in me questa convinzione. So di aver saputo che gli scenari e i costumi erano «artificiali», perché mi rallegravo profondamente che fossero artificiali. Mi piaceva l’idea che le cose fossero fatte di legno dipinto o intonacate a mano d’oro e d’argento. Erano i paramenti e gli ornamenti del rito; ma non erano il rito, e ancor meno la rivelazione. Mi piaceva la scatola magica chiamata palcoscenico, perché lì, per qualche ragione, la luce che mai fu su mare o su terra era sulla vernice e sul cartone. Ma sapevo perfettamente bene che era vernice e cartone. Sarebbe impossibile non saperlo, per chi possedeva un teatrino di giocattolo tutto suo. Nella pantomima della mia infanzia, con la sua scenografia un po’ più semplice, c’erano trucchi di semplice falegnameria scenica che godevo tanto quanto se li stessi manovrando io stesso. C’era un modo di rappresentare le onde in tempesta, mediante fila dietro fila di muri azzurri smerlati come quinte di fondo, mossi in direzioni opposte, cosicché le creste sembravano incrociarsi e danzare. Sapevo come si faceva, perché mio padre lo faceva lui stesso sotto i miei occhi, nel mio teatrino di casa. Eppure ciò mi dava una tale estasi che ancora adesso, quando ci penso per un istante, il cuore mi balza in petto come l’onda. Sapevo che non era acqua, ma sapevo che era mare; e in quel lampo di conoscenza io ero passato ben oltre coloro che soffrono l’illusione fissa e agghiacciante, proferita dal poeta pessimista, secondo cui «il mare è una gran quantità d’acqua che si trova a essere lì». Nell’immaginazione non c’è illusione; no, nemmeno un istante d’illusione. Perché neppure per una frazione di secondo, allora, io credetti che avessero tagliato in due un uomo vivo — anche se era soltanto un poliziotto. Se l’avessi creduto, avrei provato tutt’altro. Ciò che provavo era che la cosa era giusta; che era una cosa buona e dilatante e ispiratrice da vedere; che era una cosa eccellente affacciarsi su quella strana strada dove simili cose si potevano vedere; in breve, potevo dire allora, con animo del tutto indiviso, che era davvero un bel regalo di Natale andare alla pantomima.
LEGGERE L’ENIGMA
Un numero infinito di anni fa, quando ero la principale debolezza dell’ufficio di un editore, ricordo che da quello stabilimento fu dato alle stampe un libro di filosofia altamente moderna: un’opera di elaborata spiegazione evoluzionistica di tutto e di niente; un’opera della Nuova Teologia. Si intitolava “The Great Problem Solved” o qualcosa del genere. Quando questo libro fu in circolazione da pochi giorni, cominciò a promettere un successo del tutto inatteso. I librai mandavano a informarsi, i commessi viaggiatori entravano a chiederlo, persino il pubblico ordinario stazionava in una sorta di capannello davanti alla porta, e mandava dentro gli spiriti più audaci a chiedere notizie.
Persino all’editore questa popolarità sembrava notevole; a me (che avevo dato una scorsa all’opera, quando avrei dovuto essere altrimenti occupato) appariva assolutamente incredibile.
Dopo qualche po’ di tempo, tuttavia, quando ebbero esaminato “The Great Problem Solved”, anche il problema minore fu risolto. Scoprimmo che la gente lo comprava nella convinzione che fosse un romanzo poliziesco. Non li biasimo per il loro desiderio, e di certo non li biasimo per la loro delusione. Deve averli esasperati, come di sicuro infurierebbe me, aprire un libro aspettandosi di trovarvi una storia accogliente, benevola e umana su un uomo assassinato ritrovato in un armadio, e trovarvi invece un mucchio di scialba, cattiva filosofia sul progresso ascendente e sulla moralità più pura. Preferirei leggere qualsiasi libro poliziesco a quel libro. Preferirei spendere il mio tempo a scoprire perché un uomo morto fosse morto, piuttosto che a comprendere lentamente perché un certo filosofo non fosse mai stato vivo.
But this little incident has always stuck to me as a symbol of what is really wrong with modern popular religion. Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul, than a work of silly police fiction? Why is a work of modern theology less startling, less arresting to the soul than a work of old theology? When those unfortunate clients bought “The Great Problem Solved”, perhaps it was inevitable that they should feel slightly cooled and lowered in their vitality; perhaps no philosophical work can really be so good as a good detective story. But at any rate there need not have been such an absolute abyss between them. People need not have felt that they had paid for the most exciting kind of book and got the least exciting kind of book. It cannot be right that religion should be the dullest of subjects. There must be something wrong if the most important human business is also the least exciting. There must be something wrong if everything is not interesting.
A man called Smith goes out for a walk, and stops by a bookstall, where he sees a book called “The Great Problem Solved”. If Smith finds that this book solves a problem in crime, he is entranced. If Smith finds that it solves a problem in chess, he is interested. If Smith finds that it solves the problem in the last issue of Answers, he is genuinely excited. But if Smith finds that it solves the problem of Smith, that it explains the stones under his feet, and the stars over his head, that it tells him suddenly why it really is that he likes chess or detective stories, or anything else; if I say, Smith finds that the book explains Smith—then we are told he finds it dull. It may be a democratic prejudice, but I do not believe this. I think that Smith likes modern chess problems more than modern philosophical problems for the very simple reason that they are better. I think he likes a modern detective story better than a modern religion simply because there are some good modern detective stories and no good modern religions. In short, he buys “The Great Problem Solved” as a police novel, because be knows that in a police novel, in some shape or form, the great problem will be solved. And he does not buy it as a book of modern philosophy, because he knows that in a book of modern philosophy, the great problem will certainly not be solved. This title as the title of a police romance is a sensation, but as the title of a metaphysical work it is a swindle. Those early friends of mine bought the book when they thought that it solved the mystery of Berkeley-square, but dropped it like hot bricks when they found that it professed only to solve the mystery of existence. But if those people had really believed for a moment that it did solve the mystery of existence they would not have dropped it like hot bricks. They would have walked over hot bricks for ten miles to find it.
That forgotten book may stand as a type of all the new theological literature. What is wrong with it is not that it professes to state the paradox of God, but that it professes to state the paradox of God as a truism. You may or may not be able to reveal the divine secret; but at least you cannot let it leak out. If ever it comes, it will be unmistakable, it will kill or cure. Judaism, with its dark sublimity, said that if a man saw God he would die. Christianity conjectures that (by an even more catastrophic fatality) if he sees God he will live for ever. But whatever happens will be something decisive and indubitable. A man after seeing God may die; but at least he will not be slightly unwell, and then have to take a little medicine and then have to call in a doctor. If any of us ever do read the riddle, we shall read it in brutal black and blazing white, exactly as we do read the riddle of some sixpenny mystery of murder. If we ever do find the solution, we shall know that it is the right solution.
This dark and drastic quality there has been certainly in all real religions. The ordinary detective story has one deep quality in common with Christianity; it brings home the crime in a quarter that is unsuspected. In any good detective story the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The judgment at the end of any silly sensational story is like the judgment at the end of the world; it is unexpected. As the sensational story always makes the apparently blameless banker, the seemingly spotless aristocrat, the author of the incomprehensible crime, so the author of Christianity told us that in the end the bolt would fall with a brutal novelty, and he that exalted himself would be abased.
The actual records of great religions are so terribly theatrical that Mr. Bernard Shaw recently said that the story of the Crucifixion in the Gospels was too dramatic to be true. This is sufficiently characteristic of the Fabian political philosophy, which has never lived in the heart of any heroic politics. The story of Danton and Robespierre (to take an accidental example) with its “speeches”, “eternal daring”, “If we do this our names are never forgotten among men”, “The blood of Danton chokes you”, “There is a God”—shows what men do say. These things were said, and said suddenly, because the heart of man was high. When man is at his utmost he is in a state indescribable; he tells the truth or dies.
It is not in your lot or mine to live in a great or an ecstatic age. Men talk of the noise and unrest of our age; but I think that all that age is really very sleepy; all the wheels and the traffic send one to sleep. The shrieking pistons and the shattering hammers are one enormous and most soothing lullaby. But even in our quiet life I think we can feel the great fact that is the core of all religion. However quiet may be the skies, or however cool the meadows, we always feel that if we did know what they meant the meaning would be something mighty and shattering. About the weakest weed there is still a sensational difference between understanding and not understanding. We stare at a tree in an infinite leisure; but we know all the time that the real difference is between a stillness of mystery and an explosion of explanation. We know all the time that the question is whether it will always continue to be a tree or turn suddenly into something else.
Ma questo piccolo episodio mi è sempre rimasto impresso come un simbolo di ciò che davvero non va nella moderna religione popolare. Perché un’opera di teologia moderna è meno sconvolgente, meno arrestante per l’anima, di un’opera di sciocca narrativa poliziesca? Perché un’opera di teologia moderna è meno sconvolgente, meno arrestante per l’anima, di un’opera di teologia antica? Quando quegli sventurati clienti comprarono “The Great Problem Solved”, forse era inevitabile che si sentissero un poco raffreddati e abbassati nella loro vitalità; forse nessun’opera filosofica può essere davvero buona quanto una buona storia poliziesca. Ma, a ogni modo, non ci sarebbe stato bisogno di un abisso così assoluto tra le due cose. Non ci sarebbe stato bisogno che la gente sentisse di aver pagato per il genere di libro più eccitante e di aver ottenuto il genere di libro meno eccitante. Non può essere giusto che la religione sia il più tedioso dei soggetti. Ci dev’essere qualcosa che non va, se la più importante delle faccende umane è anche la meno eccitante. Ci dev’essere qualcosa che non va, se non tutto è interessante.
Un uomo di nome Smith esce a fare una passeggiata, e si ferma presso una bancarella di libri, dove vede un libro intitolato “The Great Problem Solved”. Se Smith scopre che questo libro risolve un problema di criminalità, ne è rapito. Se Smith scopre che risolve un problema di scacchi, ne è interessato. Se Smith scopre che risolve il problema dell’ultimo numero di “Answers”, ne è genuinamente eccitato. Ma se Smith scopre che risolve il problema di Smith, che spiega le pietre sotto i suoi piedi e le stelle sopra il suo capo, che gli dice d’un tratto perché in realtà gli piacciono gli scacchi o le storie poliziesche, o qualsiasi altra cosa; se, dico, Smith scopre che il libro spiega Smith — allora ci vien detto che lo trova tedioso. Sarà anche un pregiudizio democratico, ma io non ci credo. Credo che a Smith piacciano i moderni problemi di scacchi più dei moderni problemi filosofici per la ragione semplicissima che sono migliori. Credo che gli piaccia una moderna storia poliziesca più di una moderna religione semplicemente perché ci sono alcune buone moderne storie poliziesche e nessuna buona moderna religione. In breve, egli compra “The Great Problem Solved” come romanzo poliziesco, perché sa che in un romanzo poliziesco, in una forma o nell’altra, il grande problema verrà risolto. E non lo compra come libro di filosofia moderna, perché sa che in un libro di filosofia moderna il grande problema di certo non verrà risolto. Questo titolo, come titolo di un romanzo poliziesco, è una sensazione, ma come titolo di un’opera metafisica è una truffa. Quei miei antichi amici comprarono il libro quando pensarono che risolvesse il mistero di Berkeley Square, ma lo lasciarono cadere come mattoni roventi quando scoprirono che pretendeva soltanto di risolvere il mistero dell’esistenza. Ma se quella gente avesse davvero creduto, anche per un istante, che esso risolvesse il mistero dell’esistenza, non lo avrebbe lasciato cadere come mattoni roventi. Avrebbe camminato su mattoni roventi per dieci miglia pur di trovarlo.
Quel libro dimenticato può valere come tipo di tutta la nuova letteratura teologica. Ciò che vi è di sbagliato non è che pretenda di enunciare il paradosso di Dio, ma che pretenda di enunciare il paradosso di Dio come un truismo. Potete essere o non essere in grado di rivelare il segreto divino; ma almeno non potete lasciarlo trapelare. Se mai verrà, sarà inconfondibile, ucciderà o guarirà. Il giudaismo, con la sua oscura sublimità, diceva che se un uomo vedeva Dio moriva. Il cristianesimo congettura che (per una fatalità ancor più catastrofica) se un uomo vede Dio vivrà in eterno. Ma qualunque cosa accada, sarà qualcosa di decisivo e indubitabile. Un uomo, dopo aver visto Dio, può morire; ma almeno non si sentirà leggermente indisposto, per poi dover prendere un po’ di medicina e poi dover chiamare un medico. Se mai qualcuno di noi leggerà l’enigma, lo leggeremo in nero brutale e in bianco fiammeggiante, esattamente come leggiamo l’enigma di un qualche giallo da quattro soldi su un delitto. Se mai ne troveremo la soluzione, sapremo che è la soluzione giusta.
Questa qualità cupa e drastica c’è stata di certo in tutte le religioni autentiche. La comune storia poliziesca ha una profonda qualità in comune con il cristianesimo: fa ricadere a casa il delitto da un lato insospettato. In ogni buona storia poliziesca gli ultimi saranno i primi e i primi saranno gli ultimi. Il giudizio alla fine di ogni sciocca storia sensazionale è come il giudizio alla fine del mondo: è inatteso. Come la storia sensazionale fa sempre del banchiere apparentemente irreprensibile, dell’aristocratico apparentemente immacolato, l’autore del delitto incomprensibile, così l’autore del cristianesimo ci disse che alla fine il fulmine cadrà con una brutale novità, e chi avrà esaltato se stesso sarà abbassato.
Le testimonianze effettive delle grandi religioni sono così terribilmente teatrali che il signor Bernard Shaw ha detto di recente che la storia della Crocifissione nei Vangeli era troppo drammatica per essere vera. Il che è sufficientemente caratteristico della filosofia politica fabiana, che non è mai vissuta nel cuore di alcuna politica eroica. La storia di Danton e Robespierre (per prendere un esempio a caso), con i suoi «discorsi», la sua «audacia eterna», il suo «Se faremo questo, i nostri nomi non saranno mai dimenticati fra gli uomini», il suo «Il sangue di Danton ti soffoca», il suo «C’è un Dio» — mostra ciò che gli uomini davvero dicono. Queste cose furono dette, e dette d’un tratto, perché il cuore dell’uomo era in alto. Quando l’uomo è al suo culmine, si trova in uno stato indescrivibile; dice la verità o muore.
Non è nella sorte vostra né nella mia vivere in un’epoca grande o estatica. Si parla del frastuono e dell’inquietudine della nostra epoca; ma io penso che tutta questa epoca sia in realtà assai sonnolenta; tutte le ruote e tutto il traffico ci conciliano il sonno. Gli stantuffi stridenti e i martelli fragorosi sono un’unica, enorme e più che rasserenante ninnananna. Ma persino nella nostra vita tranquilla io penso che possiamo sentire il grande fatto che è il nucleo di ogni religione. Per quanto quieti possano essere i cieli, o per quanto freschi i prati, sentiamo sempre che se davvero sapessimo che cosa significano, il loro significato sarebbe qualcosa di possente e sconvolgente. Intorno alla più debole delle erbacce c’è pur sempre una sensazionale differenza fra il comprendere e il non comprendere. Fissiamo un albero in un ozio infinito; ma sappiamo per tutto il tempo che la vera differenza è quella fra un silenzio di mistero e un’esplosione di spiegazione. Sappiamo per tutto il tempo che la questione è se esso continuerà sempre a essere un albero o se si trasformerà d’un tratto in qualcos’altro.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A Tale of Two Cities was written in the later part of Dicken’s literary development, and in one respect stands absolutely alone among all his works. It is, I think, the one solitary instance, from which a critic in distant days could possibly deduce that this very great literary man had ever read any literature at all. This generalisation may be subject to certain partial modifications, to be considered when we consider the course of his life; but as a matter of proportion, which is the essential of truth, it is true. In a thousand ways, ranging from the most depressing destitution to the most pantomimic parade and luxury, Dickens showed that he had studied life, and could turn life into literature. In a thousand moods, ranging from the rankest vulgar farce to the most stagey and melodramatic morality, he showed that he had within himself the powers and passions and appetites to stock the whole world with stories. But very seldom indeed, in enjoying the world of Dickens, do we feel that there was really any writer but Dickens in the world. Like all very creative men, he unfixes the dates of history, and stands as a sort of immortal anachronism. It is sometimes with a sort of start that we remember that his Hogarthian farce and tragedy went on long after Keats had written “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and well into the time when Tennyson was writing the poems of his best period, which was his Pre-Raphaelite period. Dickens, in practice and in private life, was a very great admirer of Tennyson. Forster, his biographer, says that his literary tastes touching his contemporaries varied very much, but that he never failed in his admiration of Tennyson. But I do not honestly believe that anybody could guess, from any printed word— from the first words about Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate, to the last broken and doubtful sentences that hint at the identity of Datchery or the destruction of Drood—that Dickens had taken any particular pleasure in “The Lady of Shalott”, or “Sir Galahad”. It is partly a tribute to the strength of Dickens that his mind was so teeming with images that he never needed to borrow mere ideas. It is partly, also a real weakness in his position, that he had never valued the great culture of the past, and therefore could not fully understand its developments all around him in the culture of the present. But, for good or evil, it is true that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred nobody (to use a popular phrase) ever made a bulge in Dickens; nobody even made a dent in him. He remained, with all his gifts and glories, solidly and almost insolently himself. The one example, among all works of his authorship, in which we feel even faintly the presence, or perhaps the shadow, of another author, is A Tale of Two Cities; and that other author is Thomas Carlyle.
As I have said, the normal human conditions necessary to his normal human life, involved some modification of this statement. He was very largely what is called a self-taught man, which means that be was taught, not by himself, but by other people; by other people acting as they really act in the real world, and not as they pose before pupils they are paid to teach. His domestic circumstances from the first were very insecure, so that he saw more of books than of school-books; he learned more from tattered volumes left about in a tavern than from grammars provided primly in an educational establishment. But it is quite true that among the tattered volumes in the tavern, or elsewhere, there were some with titles not yet entirely forgotten: titles like Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones and Roderick Random and Tristram Shandy. In this sense it is true that he, like every other human being who ever wrote or even read, owed something to what had already been written. And indeed the great comic classics, which were the glory of eighteenth-century England, did leave a certain trend or track in his mind, which is an utterly trackless waste as regards all the things that anybody could ever have tried to teach him in school. It is evident, however, from the very nature of the story itself, that school in his case must have been almost as intermittent as truancy. Charles Dickens was born in Portsea, adjoining Portsmouth, in 1812, and was promptly carried away from it at the age of two. He then became a Londoner for a few years, equally infantile; and then his wandering family settled down in Chatham, which was about the nearest approach it ever made to settling down anywhere. Thus we find first the two facts, that are both determining and important: one, that his family was one of very varied economic fortunes, such as leads to frequent change of abode, and has indeed made the modern poorer middle class almost as nomadic as Arabs; and the other, that such background as a child of genius will always feel and value (if he has half a chance to do it) was for Charles Dickens, to the day of his death, the great roads of Kent that go down to Dover; and the gardens and hopfields and the towers of Rochester Cathedral. In so far as he had any traditions, that was his traditional environment; just as in so far as he had any culture, it was that of the great comic novelists of England a hundred years before. He was so far traditional by instinct that he never forgot either of the influences; he named one of his sons after Henry Fielding; and, when he came to comfort and affluence, he made his home on Gad’s Hill, on that great Kentish road where Falstaff had played the glorious fool long ago.
The private life of Dickens, however, is of little importance to the outline of criticism here involved, and is indeed in its own nature somewhat irrelevant and accidental. Its chief tragedy was almost an accident, and its premature close was a sort of defeat brought about by an excess of triumphs. It is well known that in his early youth, while he was still a parliamentary reporter living in London after his boyhood in Chatham, he married the daughter of one of his literary patrons named Hogarth, and that by a long process of disagreement, about which critics can always disagree, he came to be alienated from his wife; though, curiously enough, remaining on terms of perfectly sober and fraternal friendship with one of her sisters. There is no need to pronounce upon a problem which was really kept private, by the not undignified prejudice of the Victorian time; it is enough to say that no very grave charge was ever brought against either party by any of the small group of people who knew the truth. It is more relevant here to remark that at almost the same moment as his marriage occurred his first and perhaps most triumphant entry into literature. His first book, commonly called Pickwick or the Pickwick Papers, is supreme among his works in many ways, but especially in the way here in question: that it is a purely personal creation and owes nothing to any other book. It is all the more amusing to remember that a spiteful attempt was made by some of his enemies to suggest that it owed everything to its original illustrator, an artist named Seymour, who drew spirited sporting sketches of the sort then fashionable. It is a peculiarly false insinuation, in a literary sense. For it is the whole point of Pickwick that its rush of inspiration not only leaves Seymour’s first ideas behind, but leaves Dickens’ first ideas quite as far behind. We might say that the whole point of Pickwick is that it does not stick to the point; or at least that the point is not Pickwick, in the sense of the President of the Pickwick Club. The best things in Pickwick have nothing to do with the principal characters, still less with the preliminary chapters, and least of all with the early illustrations. It is an exceptional case in which the story grows better the more it strays from the story. Dickens did not preserve this limpid and perfect liberty in his later stories. He produced better novels, but never so good a book. Still, we can say of the ensuing series of books that, whatever else they were, they were not bookish. They showed Dickens interested in different things, but never any other authors influencing Dickens. Thus, in his next book Oliver Twist, which he seemed resolved to make as grim and lurid as Pickwick had been gay and luminous, he was in fact protesting against many social evils, which had already produced noble protests from great men of that age. The workhouse he hated had been hated as healthily by Cobbett or by Hood, by Cartwright or by Carlyle. But nobody could say that one word of Oliver Twist sounds as if it were suggested by the style of Cobbett or by the style of Carlyle. Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit show him even more obviously walking down his own street, in some ways even a narrow and Cockney street; the same applies to The Old Curiosity Shop; and, though Barnaby Rudge is a sort of experiment in the way of a historical novel, it is not much more really historical than the Old Curiosity Shop or its Wardour Street curiosities. Dombey and Son has the same now established balance of perfect comedy and rather imperfect melodrama; and though David Copperfield strikes far deeper, and releases a much finer spring of inspiration, it is even more personal than the rest. Dickens has found a new source of inspiration, but not by reading anybody else’s book; rather by reading his own diary. The same statement applies to that fine book, Great Expectations, and a much sharper social criticism, still extorted by contemporary facts rather than contemporary culture, appears in the unconscious or unclassifiable Socialism of Hard Times. It mixes his own observations less with mere fancies than did his first protest in Oliver Twist; but it is always his own observations and nobody else’s. There is little to vary this verdict in the other two novels of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. It is only when we come to the book which is here specially in question, A Tale of Two Cities, which appeared in 1859, that we have anything like the particular impression of which I speak; that Dickens has felt the pressure of an imaginative atmosphere outside his own bursting sufficiency and energy, that energy from whose centrifugal fury all fancies but his own had been spurned away.
RACCONTO DI DUE CITTÀ
Racconto di due città fu scritto nella fase più tarda dello sviluppo letterario di Dickens e, sotto un certo aspetto, si erge assolutamente solitario fra tutte le sue opere. È, credo, l’unico caso isolato dal quale un critico dei giorni lontani potrebbe forse dedurre che questo grandissimo uomo di lettere avesse mai letto un rigo di letteratura. Questa generalizzazione può essere soggetta a certe parziali modificazioni, da considerarsi quando prenderemo in esame il corso della sua vita; ma come questione di proporzione, che è l’essenza della verità, essa è vera. In mille modi, che spaziano dall’indigenza più deprimente alla più pantomimica sfilata e sfarzo, Dickens mostrò di aver studiato la vita e di saperla tramutare in letteratura. In mille umori, che spaziano dalla farsa più goffamente volgare alla moralità più teatrale e melodrammatica, egli mostrò di avere in sé le forze, le passioni e gli appetiti per rifornire di storie il mondo intero. Ma assai di rado, in verità, godendo del mondo di Dickens, avvertiamo che vi fosse davvero al mondo altro scrittore che Dickens. Come tutti gli uomini profondamente creativi, egli scardina le date della storia e sta lì come una sorta di immortale anacronismo. È talvolta con una specie di sussulto che ci rammentiamo come la sua farsa e la sua tragedia hogarthiane proseguissero a lungo dopo che Keats ebbe scritto «La Belle Dame Sans Merci», e ben addentro al tempo in cui Tennyson andava scrivendo le poesie del suo periodo migliore, che fu il suo periodo preraffaellita. Dickens, nella pratica e nella vita privata, era un grandissimo ammiratore di Tennyson. Forster, suo biografo, dice che i suoi gusti letterari riguardo ai contemporanei variavano moltissimo, ma che egli non venne mai meno all’ammirazione per Tennyson. Eppure non credo onestamente che alcuno potrebbe indovinare, da una sola parola stampata — dalle prime parole sul signor Pickwick e sul signor Blotton di Aldgate, fino alle ultime frasi spezzate e incerte che alludono all’identità di Datchery o alla rovina di Drood — che Dickens avesse tratto un particolare diletto dalla «Lady of Shalott» o da «Sir Galahad». È in parte un omaggio alla forza di Dickens che la sua mente pullulasse a tal segno di immagini da non aver mai bisogno di prendere in prestito semplici idee. È in parte, anche, una reale debolezza della sua posizione l’aver egli mai fatto conto della grande cultura del passato, e il non poter perciò comprendere appieno gli sviluppi di essa che gli fiorivano tutt’intorno nella cultura del presente. Ma, nel bene o nel male, è vero che in novantanove casi su cento nessuno (per usare una frase corrente) fece mai una gobba in Dickens; nessuno vi lasciò neppure un’ammaccatura. Egli rimase, con tutti i suoi doni e le sue glorie, solidamente e quasi insolentemente se stesso. L’unico esempio, fra tutte le opere della sua penna, in cui avvertiamo sia pur debolmente la presenza, o forse l’ombra, di un altro autore, è Racconto di due città; e quell’altro autore è Thomas Carlyle.
Come ho detto, le normali condizioni umane necessarie alla sua normale vita umana comportavano qualche modificazione di questa affermazione. Egli era in larghissima misura ciò che si dice un autodidatta, il che significa che fu istruito non da se stesso, ma da altra gente; da altra gente che agiva come agisce davvero nel mondo reale, e non come si atteggia dinanzi ad allievi che è pagata per istruire. Le sue circostanze domestiche furono fin dal principio assai precarie, cosicché vide più libri che libri di scuola; imparò più da volumi sbrindellati lasciati in giro in una taverna che dalle grammatiche fornite con compunzione in un istituto d’istruzione. Ma è ben vero che tra i volumi sbrindellati nella taverna, o altrove, ve n’erano alcuni dai titoli non ancora del tutto dimenticati: titoli come Robinson Crusoe e Tom Jones e Roderick Random e Tristram Shandy. In questo senso è vero che egli, come ogni altro essere umano che abbia mai scritto o anche solo letto, doveva qualcosa a ciò che era già stato scritto. E davvero i grandi classici comici, che furono la gloria dell’Inghilterra del Settecento, lasciarono nella sua mente una certa china o un certo solco, laddove essa è un deserto assolutamente privo di solchi rispetto a tutto ciò che chiunque abbia mai potuto tentare di insegnargli a scuola. È evidente, tuttavia, dalla natura stessa della storia, che la scuola nel suo caso dev’essere stata quasi altrettanto intermittente delle sue fughe da essa. Charles Dickens nacque a Portsea, adiacente a Portsmouth, nel 1812, e ne fu prontamente portato via all’età di due anni. Divenne poi londinese per qualche anno, altrettanto infantile; e poi la sua famiglia errabonda si stabilì a Chatham, che fu quanto di più vicino essa mai giunse a stabilirsi in qualche luogo. Troviamo così anzitutto i due fatti, entrambi determinanti e importanti: uno, che la sua famiglia era di fortune economiche assai varie, tali da indurre frequenti cambi di dimora, e che hanno in effetti reso la moderna piccola borghesia più povera quasi nomade come gli Arabi; e l’altro, che quello sfondo che un fanciullo di genio sempre sentirà e apprezzerà (se ne ha mezza occasione) fu per Charles Dickens, fino al giorno della sua morte, le grandi strade del Kent che scendono a Dover; e i giardini e i campi di luppolo e le torri della cattedrale di Rochester. In quanto egli ebbe delle tradizioni, quello fu il suo ambiente tradizionale; così come in quanto ebbe una cultura, essa fu quella dei grandi romanzieri comici d’Inghilterra di cent’anni prima. Era a tal punto tradizionale per istinto che non dimenticò mai né l’una né l’altra di quelle influenze; chiamò uno dei suoi figli col nome di Henry Fielding; e, quando pervenne all’agiatezza e all’abbondanza, pose la propria dimora a Gad’s Hill, su quella grande strada del Kent dove Falstaff aveva fatto tanto tempo prima il glorioso buffone.
La vita privata di Dickens, però, è di scarsa importanza per il profilo critico qui in gioco, ed è anzi per sua natura alquanto irrilevante e accidentale. La sua principale tragedia fu quasi un accidente, e la sua conclusione prematura fu una sorta di sconfitta prodotta da un eccesso di trionfi. È ben noto che nella prima giovinezza, quando era ancora cronista parlamentare e viveva a Londra dopo la fanciullezza a Chatham, egli sposò la figlia di uno dei suoi mecenati letterari, di nome Hogarth, e che per un lungo processo di dissapori, sui quali i critici possono sempre dissentire, giunse ad estraniarsi dalla moglie; pur rimanendo, per quanto curioso, in rapporti di perfettamente sobria e fraterna amicizia con una delle sorelle di lei. Non v’è bisogno di pronunciarsi su un problema che fu davvero tenuto privato dal non indegno pudore dell’età vittoriana; basti dire che nessuna accusa davvero grave fu mai mossa contro l’una o l’altra parte da alcuno del piccolo gruppo di persone che conoscevano la verità. Più pertinente è qui osservare che quasi nel medesimo istante del suo matrimonio avvenne il suo primo e forse più trionfale ingresso nella letteratura. Il suo primo libro, comunemente chiamato Pickwick o Il Circolo Pickwick, è supremo fra le sue opere in molti modi, ma specialmente nel modo qui in questione: che è una creazione puramente personale e non deve nulla ad alcun altro libro. Tanto più diverte ricordare che alcuni suoi nemici tentarono con malanimo di insinuare che esso dovesse ogni cosa al suo illustratore originario, un artista di nome Seymour, che disegnava vivaci schizzi sportivi del genere allora di moda. È un’insinuazione particolarmente falsa, in senso letterario. Poiché tutto il senso di Pickwick è che il suo impeto d’ispirazione non solo si lascia alle spalle le prime idee di Seymour, ma si lascia alle spalle altrettanto lontano le prime idee di Dickens. Potremmo dire che tutto il senso di Pickwick è che esso non tiene fede al punto; o almeno che il punto non è Pickwick, nel senso del Presidente del Circolo Pickwick. Le cose migliori di Pickwick non hanno nulla a che fare coi personaggi principali, ancor meno coi capitoli preliminari, e meno che mai con le prime illustrazioni. È un caso eccezionale in cui la storia migliora quanto più si allontana dalla storia. Dickens non conservò questa limpida e perfetta libertà nelle sue storie successive. Produsse romanzi migliori, ma mai un libro così bello. Eppure possiamo dire dell’ulteriore serie di libri che, qualunque altra cosa fossero, non erano libreschi. Mostravano Dickens interessato a cose diverse, ma mai nessun altro autore che influenzasse Dickens. Così, nel suo libro seguente, Oliver Twist, che parve risoluto a rendere tanto cupo e sinistro quanto Pickwick era stato gaio e luminoso, egli protestava in realtà contro molti mali sociali, che avevano già suscitato nobili proteste da grandi uomini di quell’età. Il ricovero dei poveri che egli odiava era stato odiato altrettanto sanamente da Cobbett o da Hood, da Cartwright o da Carlyle. Ma nessuno potrebbe dire che una sola parola di Oliver Twist suoni come se fosse suggerita dallo stile di Cobbett o dallo stile di Carlyle. Nicholas Nickleby e Martin Chuzzlewit lo mostrano ancor più manifestamente mentre percorre la sua propria strada, per certi versi persino una strada angusta e cockney; lo stesso vale per La bottega dell’antiquario; e, per quanto Barnaby Rudge sia una sorta di esperimento nel genere del romanzo storico, non è molto più realmente storico della Bottega dell’antiquario o delle sue curiosità da Wardour Street. Dombey e Figlio ha lo stesso ormai stabilito equilibrio di perfetta commedia e di melodramma piuttosto imperfetto; e benché David Copperfield scavi assai più a fondo e liberi una assai più fine sorgente d’ispirazione, esso è persino più personale del resto. Dickens ha trovato una nuova fonte d’ispirazione, ma non leggendo il libro di qualcun altro; piuttosto leggendo il proprio diario. La stessa affermazione vale per quel bel libro, Great Expectations, e una critica sociale assai più tagliente, ancora estorta dai fatti contemporanei più che dalla cultura contemporanea, appare nel Socialismo inconsapevole o inclassificabile di Tempi difficili. Esso mescola le sue proprie osservazioni con mere fantasie meno di quanto facesse la sua prima protesta in Oliver Twist; ma sono sempre le sue proprie osservazioni e di nessun altro. Poco v’è che vari questo verdetto negli altri due romanzi, Casa desolata (Bleak House) e La piccola Dorrit. È solo quando giungiamo al libro qui specialmente in questione, Racconto di due città, che apparve nel 1859, che abbiamo qualcosa come la particolare impressione di cui parlo; che Dickens ha sentito la pressione di un’atmosfera immaginativa esterna alla propria prorompente autosufficienza ed energia, quell’energia dalla cui furia centrifuga tutte le fantasie tranne le sue erano state respinte via.
This compact and competent, and some would say conceited, sense of self-expression does in A Tale of Two Cities, for the first time, seem to admit something external, something that might be called an echo. Indeed, in one way, it might be called the echo of an echo. It is Carlyle’s French Revolution rather than Michelet’s French Revolution; in other words, it is not entirely or exactly the French Revolution of the French Revolutionists. Dickens does tend to neglect, as Carlyle did tend to neglect, the extent to which the revolutionists themselves regarded it not as an explosion of unreason, or even an explosion of passion, but as an inevitable explosion of reason. They themselves might almost have said that the explosion was an explanation; as is the explosion that occurs during a chemical lecture. Carlyle, who had laboriously studied all the documents and historical literature of the French Revolution, never quite understood this. It is small blame by comparison to Dickens, who had never studied any documents or any history or any literature, or hardly any books except his own, if he did not understand it either. But he had studied one book, and that was Carlyle’s book; and the shadow of that luminous but lurid cloud lies over the whole landscape and scenery of his story. It is very difficult to define or prove these merely atmospheric things. A short if clumsy way of putting it is to compare the general tone of Dickens towards the mere notion of a mob, as it is in Barnaby Rudge, with his tone towards such a mob in A Tale of Two Cities. The comparison, of course, is not quite fair. Even a man so little in touch with history as he, could tell that the second was more historic than the first; that the second was at least an outbreak of liberty, by comparison with an outbreak of bigotry. But there is more in the contrast than that; we feel that he could never have taken a Gordon Rioter seriously, even if he had liked him, as he did so often seem to like his most ludicrous and indefensible characters; as the reader does really, in a way, like Sim Tappertit. He did not like Madame Defarge, but he did take her seriously. If she had occurred in Barnaby Rudge, she would have been a vulgar villainess; as she occurred in A Tale of Two Cities, she is a Fate. In other words, there is not only a romantic but a mystical element that has entered the story; and though Dickens was in one sense always a romantic, he was certainly never a mystic. In some sense the comparison involves a paradox. Carlyle, as a reactionary, declared that the mob, being made of most men, was made mostly of fools. But Carlyle also allowed for a mystical suggestion that the folly of men was the wisdom of God. Dickens, as a radical, regarded the mob, in so far as it meant most ordinary men, as being composed of reasonable and responsible citizens, whose votes were all valuable and whose intellects were all capable of benefiting by education and discussion. But, in practice, when Dickens did see a mass of men in any sort of elemental disorder, acting in anger or by some accident lawless or unlettered, he was deeply disgusted in every corner of his compact and sensible intelligence, and hated that very wildness which Carlyle half admired. Dickens felt like this, for instance, towards the sprawling licence and spasmodic ferocity of the more wild and western elements of the American Republic. He would, if subjected to the real experience, have been quite as much horrified by the ferocious pugnacity and spontaneous militarism of the mob of the French Republic. Nevertheless, the Carlylean sense of a sort of savage symbolism in the great struggles of history does make the atmosphere of this book, or perhaps of half this book, different from the whole bulk of his other books.
Perhaps it is really impossible for any good citizen to write A Tale of Two Cities. He will always see one from the outside and the other from the inside; and the line of relative reality and unreality in this case runs fairly clear. Thus the description of the old-fashioned London bank is unmistakably written by the old London Dickens. The story of the sacrifice of Sydney Carton, though genuinely touching and nobler especially as compared with some of the Dickensian melodramas, is still in a sense a London melodrama, with the larger background of a Paris tragedy. The hero is being heroic for private reasons; whereas nobody understands or does justice to the French Revolution, who forgets that half its leaders lost their heads by really being heroic for public reasons. It is easy enough to make fun of their classical rhetoric about Brutus who killed his sons, or Timoleon who killed his brother; but it is not so easy to deny that, if they had too much of this notion of sacrificing private good to public good, we have far too much of the corruption and cowardice that comes of sacrificing public good to private good. The ideals for which that war was waged were insufficient but largely just; and it is curious and rather moving to note that the author is so far exalted by the atmosphere that he turns in the end to an older and in truth a larger ideal, which exists before and after and affirms the same justice in public and in private life. I know nothing in all the works of this man of genius which is, in the true sense, so imaginative as that last strange voice, coming from nowhere, those great timeless words put into the mouth of no mortal character, spoken suddenly as by a trumpet out of the empty sky, between the click of the knitting-needles and the crash of the guillotine: “I am the Resurrection and the Life …”
Questo compatto e capace, e alcuni direbbero presuntuoso, senso di autoespressione sembra davvero, in Racconto di due città, per la prima volta, ammettere qualcosa di esterno, qualcosa che si potrebbe chiamare un’eco. Anzi, in un certo senso, la si potrebbe chiamare l’eco di un’eco. È la Rivoluzione francese di Carlyle più che la Rivoluzione francese di Michelet; in altre parole, non è del tutto o esattamente la Rivoluzione francese dei rivoluzionari francesi. Dickens tende a trascurare, come Carlyle tendeva a trascurare, la misura in cui i rivoluzionari stessi la consideravano non un’esplosione di irragionevolezza, e neppure un’esplosione di passione, bensì un’inevitabile esplosione di ragione. Essi stessi avrebbero potuto quasi dire che l’esplosione era una spiegazione; come lo è l’esplosione che avviene durante una lezione di chimica. Carlyle, che aveva studiato laboriosamente tutti i documenti e la letteratura storica della Rivoluzione francese, non lo comprese mai del tutto. È colpa lieve al confronto per Dickens, che non aveva mai studiato alcun documento né alcuna storia né alcuna letteratura, né quasi alcun libro tranne i propri, se neppure lui lo comprese. Ma un libro l’aveva studiato, ed era il libro di Carlyle; e l’ombra di quella nube luminosa ma sinistra si stende su tutto il paesaggio e lo scenario della sua storia. È assai difficile definire o provare queste cose meramente atmosferiche. Un modo breve, se pur maldestro, di dirlo è confrontare il tono generale di Dickens verso la mera nozione di una folla, quale è in Barnaby Rudge, col suo tono verso una tale folla in Racconto di due città. Il confronto, s’intende, non è del tutto equo. Persino un uomo così poco in contatto con la storia come lui poteva capire che la seconda era più storica della prima; che la seconda era almeno un’esplosione di libertà, in confronto a un’esplosione di bigottismo. Ma nel contrasto v’è più di questo; sentiamo che egli non avrebbe mai potuto prendere sul serio un rivoltoso di Gordon, anche se gli fosse piaciuto, come tanto spesso pareva piacergli i suoi personaggi più ridicoli e indifendibili; come il lettore, in un certo modo, prova davvero simpatia per Sim Tappertit. Non gli piaceva Madame Defarge, ma la prendeva sul serio. Se fosse comparsa in Barnaby Rudge, sarebbe stata una volgare scellerata; comparsa com’è in Racconto di due città, è un Fato. In altre parole, v’è entrato nella storia non solo un elemento romantico ma un elemento mistico; e benché Dickens fosse in un certo senso sempre un romantico, non fu di certo mai un mistico. In un certo senso il confronto implica un paradosso. Carlyle, da reazionario, dichiarava che la folla, essendo composta della maggior parte degli uomini, era composta per la maggior parte di sciocchi. Ma Carlyle ammetteva anche una suggestione mistica secondo cui la follia degli uomini era la saggezza di Dio. Dickens, da radicale, considerava la folla, in quanto significava la maggior parte degli uomini comuni, come composta di cittadini ragionevoli e responsabili, i cui voti erano tutti preziosi e i cui intelletti erano tutti capaci di trarre giovamento dall’istruzione e dal dibattito. Ma, in pratica, quando Dickens vide davvero una massa di uomini in un qualsiasi disordine elementare, che agiva nell’ira o per qualche accidente senza legge o senza lettere, ne fu profondamente disgustato in ogni angolo della sua compatta e assennata intelligenza, e odiò proprio quella ferinità che Carlyle per metà ammirava. Dickens sentiva così, per esempio, verso la sprawlante licenza e la spasmodica ferocia degli elementi più selvaggi e occidentali della Repubblica americana. Egli sarebbe stato, se sottoposto all’esperienza reale, altrettanto inorridito dalla feroce combattività e dal militarismo spontaneo della folla della Repubblica francese. Ciò nondimeno, il senso carlyliano di una sorta di simbolismo selvaggio nelle grandi lotte della storia rende davvero l’atmosfera di questo libro, o forse di metà di questo libro, diversa dall’intera massa dei suoi altri libri.
Forse è davvero impossibile per un buon cittadino scrivere Racconto di due città. Egli vedrà sempre l’una dall’esterno e l’altra dall’interno; e in questo caso la linea di relativa realtà e irrealtà corre abbastanza chiara. Così la descrizione della banca londinese all’antica è inconfondibilmente scritta dal vecchio Dickens di Londra. La storia del sacrificio di Sydney Carton, per quanto genuinamente commovente e più nobile specie a paragone di certi melodrammi dickensiani, resta in un certo senso un melodramma londinese, col più ampio sfondo di una tragedia parigina. L’eroe è eroico per ragioni private; laddove nessuno comprende o rende giustizia alla Rivoluzione francese, se dimentica che metà dei suoi capi perse la testa proprio per essere stata eroica per ragioni pubbliche. È abbastanza facile farsi beffe della loro retorica classica su Bruto che uccise i suoi figli, o su Timoleonte che uccise il fratello; ma non è così facile negare che, se essi ebbero troppo di questa idea di sacrificare il bene privato al bene pubblico, noi abbiamo fin troppo della corruzione e della viltà che vengono dal sacrificare il bene pubblico al bene privato. Gli ideali per cui quella guerra fu combattuta erano insufficienti ma in gran parte giusti; ed è curioso e piuttosto commovente notare che l’autore è a tal punto esaltato dall’atmosfera che alla fine si volge a un ideale più antico e in verità più grande, che esiste prima e dopo e afferma la medesima giustizia nella vita pubblica e in quella privata. Non conosco nulla in tutte le opere di questo uomo di genio che sia, nel vero senso, tanto immaginifico quanto quell’ultima strana voce, che viene dal nulla, quelle grandi parole senza tempo poste sulla bocca di nessun personaggio mortale, pronunciate a un tratto come da una tromba fuori dal cielo vuoto, tra il ticchettio dei ferri da calza e lo schianto della ghigliottina: «Io sono la Risurrezione e la Vita…»
GOD AND GOODS
It is often noted, and generally truly enough, that Bolshevism is necessarily connected with atheism. It is not so much realised, perhaps, that atheism is now under an increasing necessity of connecting itself with Bolshevism. For Bolshevism is at least partly positive, even if it is largely destructive. And the history of the purely negative notion, of an abstract attack on religion, has been in this respect a rather curious history. Taken as a whole, indeed it is at once melancholy and comic. Those who in modern times have tried to destroy popular religion, or a traditional faith, have always felt the necessity of offering something solid as a substitute. The queer part of it is that they have offered about a dozen totally different things; some of them entirely contradictory things; that the promises perpetually varied, and only the negative threat remained the same.
Just before the French Revolution, among the first eighteenth-century philosophers, it was generally assumed that Liberty was not merely a good thing, but the one and only origin of all good things. The man living according to Nature, the Natural Man or the Noble Savage, would find himself immediately free and happy so long as he never went to church, and was careful to cut the parish priest in the street. These philosophers soon discovered, what the parish priest could have told them at the start, that it is rather more difficult to be a happy animal, than to be a happy man. Indeed, a man cannot be an animal for the same reason that he cannot be an angel; because be is a man. But for some time the philosophers who did not believe in God, whom they regarded as a myth, managed to believe in Nature without realising that she is a metaphor. And they assured those whom they waved on to the burning down of churches, that after that they would be eternally happy in their fields and gardens.
Then after the political revolution came the industrial revolution; and with it an enormous new importance attached to science. The amiable atheists went back to the people, smiled at them, coughed slightly, and explained that it was still necessary to burn down churches, but that a slight error had been made about the substitute for churches. The second atheist philosophy was founded, not on the fact that Nature is kind, but on the fact that Nature is cruel; not that fields are free and beautiful, but that scientific men and industrialists are so energetic, that they will soon cover all the fields with factories and warehouses. Now there was a new substitute for God; which was gas and coal and iron and the privilege of turning wheels in order to work these substances. It was now positively stated that economic liberty, the freedom to buy and sell and hire and exploit, would make people so blissfully happy that they would forget all their dreams of the fields of heaven; or for that matter of the fields of earth. And somehow that also has been a little disappointing.
Two Earthly Paradises had collapsed. The first was the natural paradise of Rousseau; the second the economic paradise of Ricardo. Men did not become perfect through being free to live and love; men did not become perfect through being free to buy and sell. It was obviously time for the atheists to find a third inevitable and immediate ideal. They have found it in Communism. And it does not trouble them that it is quite different from their first ideal and quite contrary to their second. All they want is some supposed betterment of humanity which will be a bribe for depriving humanity of divinity. Read between the lines of half a hundred new books—outlines of popular science and educational publications on history and philosophy— and you will see that the only fundamental feeling in them is the hatred of religion. The only positive thing is negative. But they are forced more and more to idealise Bolshevism, simply because it is the only thing left that is still new enough to be offered as a hope, when every one of the revolutionary hopes they have themselves offered has in its turn become hopeless.
DIO E LE MERCI
Si osserva spesso, e in genere con ragione più che sufficiente, che il bolscevismo è necessariamente legato all’ateismo. Meno ci si rende conto, forse, che l’ateismo si trova ormai sotto la crescente necessità di legarsi al bolscevismo. Poiché il bolscevismo è almeno in parte positivo, per quanto sia in larga misura distruttivo. E la storia della nozione puramente negativa, di un attacco astratto alla religione, è stata sotto questo profilo una storia alquanto curiosa. Presa nel suo insieme, essa è a un tempo malinconica e comica. Coloro che nei tempi moderni hanno tentato di distruggere la religione popolare, o una fede tradizionale, hanno sempre sentito la necessità di offrire qualcosa di solido come surrogato. La cosa bizzarra è che ne hanno offerti una dozzina di totalmente diversi; alcuni di essi del tutto contraddittori; sicché le promesse variavano di continuo, e soltanto la minaccia negativa rimaneva la stessa.
Poco prima della Rivoluzione francese, tra i primi filosofi del Settecento, si dava generalmente per assodato che la Libertà non fosse soltanto una cosa buona, ma l’unica e sola origine di ogni cosa buona. L’uomo che vive secondo Natura, l’Uomo Naturale o il Buon Selvaggio, si sarebbe trovato immediatamente libero e felice fintanto che non fosse mai andato in chiesa, e avesse avuto cura di ignorare il parroco per strada. Questi filosofi scoprirono ben presto ciò che il parroco avrebbe potuto dir loro fin dal principio: che è alquanto più difficile essere un animale felice che essere un uomo felice. In verità, un uomo non può essere un animale per la stessa ragione per cui non può essere un angelo; perché è un uomo. Ma per un certo tempo i filosofi che non credevano in Dio, il quale essi consideravano un mito, riuscirono a credere nella Natura senza avvedersi che ella è una metafora. E assicuravano a coloro che spingevano avanti verso l’incendio delle chiese, che dopo di ciò sarebbero stati eternamente felici nei loro campi e nei loro giardini.
Poi, dopo la rivoluzione politica, venne la rivoluzione industriale; e con essa un’enorme, nuova importanza attribuita alla scienza. Gli amabili atei tornarono dal popolo, gli sorrisero, tossirono lievemente, e spiegarono che era ancora necessario incendiare le chiese, ma che si era commesso un piccolo errore riguardo al surrogato delle chiese. La seconda filosofia atea si fondava non sul fatto che la Natura è benevola, ma sul fatto che la Natura è crudele; non sul fatto che i campi sono liberi e belli, ma sul fatto che gli uomini di scienza e gli industriali sono tanto energici che presto copriranno tutti i campi di fabbriche e magazzini. Ora c’era un nuovo surrogato di Dio; ed era il gas e il carbone e il ferro e il privilegio di far girare ruote allo scopo di lavorare queste sostanze. Ora si affermava positivamente che la libertà economica, la libertà di comprare e vendere e assumere e sfruttare, avrebbe reso gli uomini così beatamente felici da far loro dimenticare tutti i loro sogni dei campi del cielo; o, se è per questo, dei campi della terra. E in qualche modo anche questo è risultato un po’ deludente.
Due Paradisi Terrestri erano crollati. Il primo era il paradiso naturale di Rousseau; il secondo il paradiso economico di Ricardo. Gli uomini non divennero perfetti per il fatto di essere liberi di vivere e di amare; gli uomini non divennero perfetti per il fatto di essere liberi di comprare e vendere. Era evidentemente tempo che gli atei trovassero un terzo ideale inevitabile e immediato. Lo hanno trovato nel Comunismo. E non li turba affatto che esso sia del tutto diverso dal loro primo ideale e del tutto contrario al secondo. Tutto ciò che vogliono è un qualche presunto miglioramento dell’umanità che valga come mancia per privare l’umanità della divinità. Leggete tra le righe di una cinquantina di libri nuovi — compendi di scienza divulgativa e pubblicazioni educative di storia e di filosofia — e vedrete che l’unico sentimento fondamentale in essi è l’odio della religione. L’unica cosa positiva è negativa. Ma sono costretti sempre più a idealizzare il bolscevismo, semplicemente perché è l’unica cosa rimasta ancora abbastanza nuova da poter essere offerta come speranza, ora che ognuna delle speranze rivoluzionarie che essi stessi avevano offerto è divenuta a sua volta senza speranza.
FROM MEREDITH TO RUPERT BROOKE
The title of the Age of Reason has been given to the eighteenth century, though the typical eighteenth-century man who invented it probably meant it as a prophetic and optimistic description of the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. Certainly if Thomas Paine had foreseen the actual nineteenth century, he would have called it the Age of Romanticism. If he had foreseen the actual twentieth century, he would have called it the Age of Nonsense, the Age of Unreason, especially in the departments originally identified with rationalism, such as the department of science. To him Einstein would have been merely a contradiction in terms and Epstein a disease afflicting bronze and marble. It is therefore not altogether misleading to measure modern developments, for good or evil, as from a sort of datum line of simple or self-evident rationality to be found in the eighteenth century. Whatever else is false, it is false to say that the world has increased in clarity and intelligibility and logical completeness. Whatever else is true, it is true to say that the world has grown more bewildering, especially in the scientific spheres supposed to be ruled by law or explained by reason. The simplification of the older rationalists may have been, and indeed was, an over-simplification. But it did simplify and it did satisfy; above all, it satisfied them. It would not be altogether unfair to say that it filled them not only with satisfaction but with self-satisfaction. And, as historical divisions are never clean-cut, this rationalistic self-satisfaction descended in part to their children; in many ways it may be found pervading the nineteenth century, and, in the case of some rather old-fashioned persons, even our own century.
Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was very different; and the Victorian Age was vividly different. And it was different from the eighteenth century chiefly in this: that the old clarity of rationalism and humanitarianism was more and more coloured and clouded by certain waves of specially modern imagination or hypothesis or taste and fancy. These new notions had been unknown in the Age of Reason and even in the Age of Revolution. These sentiments had never disturbed the generalisations of Jefferson and the Jacobins any more than they had disturbed the doctrines of Johnson and the Jacobites. These sentiments colour everything in the Victorian Age, and they must be understood before attempting any survey of it.
It is generally difficult to illustrate this truth without being involved in a discussion about religion. But there is, as it happens, another outstanding example, which does not directly involve any interest in religion. I mean the enormous interest in race. That would alone be enough to stamp the nineteenth century as something sharply different from the eighteenth century. That would alone be enough to mark off the Victorian from the older Georgian frame of mind. In the eighteenth century, both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries inherited the ancient religious and philosophic habit of legislating for mankind. A man like Johnson thought of men everywhere as under certain religious conditions, though he thought them happier under conditions of subordination. A man like Jefferson thought of men everywhere as under certain moral conditions, though he thought them happiest in a condition of equality. A man like Gibbon might doubt both the moral systems of Johnson and Jefferson. But it never occurred to Gibbon to explain the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by exalting the Teuton as such against the Latin as such, or vice versa. Gibbon had religious prejudices, or, if you will, irreligious prejudices. But the notion of having racial prejudices in a quarrel between some brutal Vandal or Visigoth and some petty Byzantine official would have seemed to him as nonsensical as taking sides among Chinese tongs or Zulu tribes. Similarly, the eighteenth-century Tories were traditional but not tribal. Even a man as late as Metternich, while he might be on the watch against French atheism or even Russian orthodoxy disturbing the Austrian Empire, would have troubled his head very little over the fact that the Austrian Empire contained a mixture of Teutons and Slavs. The rise of this romance of race, or, as some would say, of this science of race, was one of the distinct and decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially of the Victorian Age.
It will be well to mark in what way these colossal clouds of historical imagination or theory actually coloured or discoloured the dead daylight, which an earlier rationalism thought to have dawned upon the world. In the case of Victorian literature, perhaps it is best tested by noting how it affected even the Victorians who might have been expected to escape its effect. Carlyle was not merely affected by it we might almost say that he was made by it. Anyhow, he was inspired and intoxicated by it; he was at once overwhelmed and made overwhelming. All his history and philosophy was full of this one idea: that all that is good in our civilisation comes, not from the older civilisation, but from a yet older thing that might be called a benevolent barbarism. All light as well as fire, all law as well as liberty, was supposed to be derived from a sort of ethnic energy originally called Germanic, afterwards more prudently called Teutonic; and now, with almost an excess of caution, called Nordic. The merits of this racial theory, as against the old Roman theory, of European culture, are difficult to discuss without trenching on controversial themes. Personally I should say that when certain European provinces broke with the Roman tradition, they set up certain Puritan theologies of their own, which could not last, or at any rate have not lasted. Anyhow, it is curious that in each of these provinces the place of both the new and the old religion has really been taken by a stark and rather narrow national pride. The Prussian is more proud of being a Prussian than of being a Protestant, in the sense of a Lutheran. The Orangeman is more proud of being what he calls an Ulsterman than of being a Calvinist, in the sense of studying the strict Calvinist theology. And even in England, where the atmosphere was more mild and the elements more mixed, the same type of intense insular self-consciousness has in some degree developed; and it has been not untruly said that patriotism is the religion of the English. In any case, to take the same test, an Englishman is normally more proud of being an Englishman than of being an Anglican. It was therefore not unnatural that when these lands, that were the extinct volcanoes of the great Puritan fire, sought for a more modern and general bond of association, they should seek it in that sort of pride in the race, which is the extension of the pride in the tribe. It is right to say that there is much in the idea of race that stirs the imagination and lends itself to the production of literature. The ideal of race, like the ideal of religion, has its own symbols, prophecies, oracles and holy places. If it is less mystical, it is equally mysterious. The riddle of heredity, the bond of blood, the doom which in a hundred human legends attends certain houses or families, are things quite sufficiently native to our nature to lend a sincerity to the sense of national or even international kinship. Many may quite honestly have felt that race was as religious as religion. But one thing it certainly was not. It was not as rational as religion. It was not as universal or philosophical as religion. At its best it involved a sort of noble prejudice; and its romanticism clouded the old general judgments upon men as men, whether dogmatic or democratic. Carlyle was the most romantic of all these romantic Victorian writers, and largely owed to this his predominance in the romantic Victorian age. But his popular champions, like Froude and Kingsley, were even more romantic; though in the case of Kingsley the romancing was really honest romancing, while in the case of Froude (I cannot but think) the word romancing is something of a euphemism.
DA MEREDITH A RUPERT BROOKE
Al Settecento è stato dato il titolo di Età della Ragione, benché il tipico uomo del Settecento che lo coniò lo intendesse probabilmente come descrizione profetica e ottimistica dell’Ottocento o del Novecento. Certo, se Thomas Paine avesse previsto l’Ottocento reale, lo avrebbe chiamato l’Età del Romanticismo. Se avesse previsto il Novecento reale, lo avrebbe chiamato l’Età dell’Insensatezza, l’Età dell’Irragionevolezza, specialmente nei campi originariamente identificati con il razionalismo, come il campo della scienza. Per lui Einstein sarebbe stato semplicemente una contraddizione in termini ed Epstein una malattia che affligge il bronzo e il marmo. Non è dunque del tutto fuorviante misurare gli sviluppi moderni, nel bene e nel male, come a partire da una sorta di linea di riferimento della razionalità semplice o evidente di per sé che si ritrova nel Settecento. Comunque stiano le altre cose false, è falso dire che il mondo sia aumentato in chiarezza, in intelligibilità e in compiutezza logica. Comunque stiano le altre cose vere, è vero dire che il mondo si è fatto più sconcertante, specialmente nelle sfere scientifiche che si supponevano rette dalla legge o spiegate dalla ragione. La semplificazione dei vecchi razionalisti può essere stata, e anzi fu, un’eccessiva semplificazione. Ma semplificava sul serio e appagava sul serio; soprattutto, appagava loro. Non sarebbe del tutto ingiusto dire che li riempiva non solo di soddisfazione, ma di autocompiacimento. E, poiché le divisioni storiche non sono mai nette, questo autocompiacimento razionalistico discese in parte ai loro figli; per molti versi lo si può trovare a permeare l’Ottocento e, nel caso di certe persone piuttosto all’antica, perfino il nostro secolo.
Ciò nondimeno, l’Ottocento fu assai diverso; e l’Età vittoriana fu vividamente diversa. E fu diversa dal Settecento soprattutto in questo: che la vecchia chiarezza del razionalismo e dell’umanitarismo fu sempre più colorata e offuscata da certe ondate di immaginazione specialmente moderna, o d’ipotesi, o di gusto e fantasia. Queste nuove nozioni erano state ignote nell’Età della Ragione e perfino nell’Età della Rivoluzione. Questi sentimenti non avevano mai turbato le generalizzazioni di Jefferson e dei giacobini più di quanto avessero turbato le dottrine di Johnson e dei giacobiti. Questi sentimenti colorano ogni cosa nell’Età vittoriana, e vanno compresi prima di tentarne una qualsiasi rassegna.
È in genere difficile illustrare questa verità senza restare invischiati in una discussione sulla religione. Ma vi è, per l’appunto, un altro esempio cospicuo, che non implica direttamente alcun interesse per la religione. Intendo l’enorme interesse per la razza. Ciò da solo basterebbe a bollare l’Ottocento come qualcosa di nettamente diverso dal Settecento. Ciò da solo basterebbe a distinguere la mentalità vittoriana da quella più antica, georgiana. Nel Settecento, tanto i reazionari quanto i rivoluzionari ereditarono l’antica abitudine religiosa e filosofica di legiferare per l’intera umanità. Un uomo come Johnson pensava agli uomini di ogni dove come soggetti a certe condizioni religiose, benché li ritenesse più felici in condizioni di subordinazione. Un uomo come Jefferson pensava agli uomini di ogni dove come soggetti a certe condizioni morali, benché li ritenesse più felici in una condizione di eguaglianza. Un uomo come Gibbon poteva pure dubitare di entrambi i sistemi morali, quello di Johnson e quello di Jefferson. Ma non venne mai in mente a Gibbon di spiegare il Declino e la Caduta dell’Impero Romano esaltando il Teutone in quanto tale contro il Latino in quanto tale, o viceversa. Gibbon aveva pregiudizi religiosi o, se si vuole, pregiudizi irreligiosi. Ma l’idea di nutrire pregiudizi razziali in una lite tra qualche brutale Vandalo o Visigoto e qualche meschino funzionario bizantino gli sarebbe parsa altrettanto assurda che parteggiare tra tong cinesi o tribù zulù. Similmente, i Tory del Settecento erano tradizionali ma non tribali. Perfino un uomo tardo come Metternich, pur potendo star in guardia contro l’ateismo francese o addirittura contro l’ortodossia russa che turbavano l’Impero austriaco, si sarebbe assai poco tormentato il capo per il fatto che l’Impero austriaco conteneva una mescolanza di Teutoni e di Slavi. Il sorgere di questo romanzo della razza, o, come alcuni direbbero, di questa scienza della razza, fu una delle distinte e decisive rivoluzioni dell’Ottocento, e specialmente dell’Età vittoriana.
Sarà bene segnare in che modo queste colossali nubi d’immaginazione o teoria storica colorarono o scolorarono in realtà la luce spenta del giorno che un razionalismo anteriore credeva fosse albeggiata sul mondo. Nel caso della letteratura vittoriana, forse la si mette meglio alla prova notando come essa influì perfino su quei vittoriani da cui ci si sarebbe aspettati che ne scampassero l’effetto. Carlyle non ne fu semplicemente influenzato: potremmo quasi dire che ne fu plasmato. Comunque, ne fu ispirato e inebriato; fu al tempo stesso travolto e reso travolgente. Tutta la sua storia e la sua filosofia erano piene di quest’unica idea: che tutto ciò che di buono vi è nella nostra civiltà proviene non dalla civiltà più antica, ma da una cosa ancora più antica che si potrebbe chiamare una benevola barbarie. Tanto la luce quanto il fuoco, tanto la legge quanto la libertà, si supponeva derivassero da una sorta di energia etnica in origine detta germanica, poi più prudentemente detta teutonica; e ora, con quasi un eccesso di cautela, detta nordica. I meriti di questa teoria razziale, contro la vecchia teoria romana, della cultura europea, sono difficili da discutere senza sconfinare in temi controversi. Personalmente direi che, quando certe province europee ruppero con la tradizione romana, esse fondarono certe proprie teologie puritane, che non potevano durare, o comunque non sono durate. Comunque, è curioso che in ciascuna di queste province il posto della religione tanto nuova quanto antica sia stato in realtà preso da un rigido e piuttosto angusto orgoglio nazionale. Il prussiano è più orgoglioso di essere prussiano che di essere protestante, nel senso di luterano. L’orangista è più orgoglioso di essere ciò che chiama un uomo dell’Ulster che di essere calvinista, nel senso di studiare la stretta teologia calvinista. E perfino in Inghilterra, dove l’atmosfera era più mite e gli elementi più mescolati, s’è sviluppato in qualche misura lo stesso tipo d’intensa autocoscienza insulare; e non a torto s’è detto che il patriottismo è la religione degli inglesi. In ogni caso, per prendere la medesima prova, un inglese è di norma più orgoglioso di essere inglese che di essere anglicano. Non era dunque innaturale che, quando queste terre, che erano i vulcani spenti del grande fuoco puritano, cercarono un più moderno e generale vincolo d’associazione, lo cercassero in quella sorta di orgoglio della razza che è l’estensione dell’orgoglio della tribù. È giusto dire che vi è molto, nell’idea di razza, che scuote l’immaginazione e si presta alla produzione di letteratura. L’ideale della razza, come l’ideale della religione, ha i propri simboli, profezie, oracoli e luoghi santi. Se è meno mistico, è ugualmente misterioso. L’enigma dell’eredità, il vincolo del sangue, la maledizione che in cento leggende umane incombe su certe casate o famiglie, sono cose abbastanza connaturate alla nostra natura da conferire una sincerità al senso di parentela nazionale o perfino internazionale. Molti possono aver sentito in tutta onestà che la razza era religiosa quanto la religione. Ma una cosa certamente non fu. Non fu razionale quanto la religione. Non fu universale né filosofica quanto la religione. Nella sua forma migliore comportava una sorta di nobile pregiudizio; e il suo romanticismo offuscava i vecchi giudizi generali sugli uomini in quanto uomini, dogmatici o democratici che fossero. Carlyle fu il più romantico di tutti questi romantici scrittori vittoriani, e a ciò dovette in larga parte la sua preminenza nella romantica età vittoriana. Ma i suoi campioni popolari, come Froude e Kingsley, furono ancor più romantici; benché, nel caso di Kingsley, il romanzare fosse davvero un romanzare onesto, mentre nel caso di Froude (non posso non pensarlo) la parola romanzare sia un qualcosa di eufemistico.
Only, as I have said, the way in which this racial romance penetrated the Victorian culture can best be seen, not in an obvious case like Carlyle, but in much more remote cases like Matthew Arnold or Meredith. To take the latter case first: George Meredith was in one sense an entirely international intellectual; a Liberal humanist; a true child of the French Revolution, which he celebrated in sumptuous odes. But he illustrates the indirect effect of the racial craze, which is that the other side often accepted the distinction. Not only did the Teutonist talk about being a Teuton, but the Celt talked about being a Celt. A great mass of Meredith’s social judgment is modified, and, to my taste, a little falsified, by his insistence on setting the Saxon against the Celt, when he has to set the Englishman against the Irishman or the Welshman. He often satirised in the Englishman exactly what the Teutonist praised in the Englishman; and it was often something that the Englishman does not happen to possess. So in the other case: Matthew Arnold made himself specially and supremely the apostle of a cosmopolitan culture; he did a vast amount of real good by insisting on the truism that England is a part of Europe. He was at his best in a contempt for the contempt that was felt for Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. But he could not bring himself to treat them simply as Frenchmen or Irishmen or Italians. He was affected by the universal fashion of ethnology and worried by the racial generalisations. When he talked what was relatively excellent sense about the senseless treatment of Ireland, he thought of such things too much as Celtic Studies and too little as Irish Studies. He also tried to explain the English faults as part of “the German paste in us”, and wasted on anthropology what was meant for the study of mankind. We might take a third example. William Morris was on one side a Communist and almost bound to be an internationalist; he was on the other side a medievalist, appealing to that ancient beauty that belonged to all Europeans alike. But he was encumbered with a clumsy desire to be Saxon, to treat English as if it were merely the rudimentary language of the Angles; and moved his admirer, Stevenson, to an intense irritation by writing “whereas” when he only meant “where”.
I have mentioned this particular Victorian fashion, the racial theory of history, as a primary and prominent thing, because it is not generally mentioned at all. We are so accustomed, in reading modern records of recent or ancient things, to gain an impression of an ever-expanding world, called in the only too typical Victorian expression, “the thoughts of men being widened by the process of the suns”, that we often forget the many periods when the world contracted into a new narrowness or exclusiveness, or the thoughts of men visibly shrank and shrivelled under some fresh influence of isolation or distinction. This was certainly true of the tribalism and imperialism that the nineteenth century developed, out of a romance of races, as compared with the first revolutionary generalisations about the human race. The fact is plain, for instance, in the story of the first revolutionary experiment— the American Republic. In the time of Jefferson, many of those who held slaves disapproved of slavery; many of those who approved of slavery did not specially approve of it as negro slavery. The notion of the negro as something peculiarly perilous or pestilent is not an ancient prejudice but a very recent and largely anthropological fashion. It is akin to all that dates from Darwin; and the popularisation by Huxley of an almost pessimistic type of evolution. Modern Southerners are much more hostile to negroes than they were when they owned slaves. As there rose recently in America the anthropological theory that the negro is only an ape, so there rose recently in Europe the anthropological notion that the Pole is only a Slav, or that the Irishman is only a Celt. People were so proud of discovering these larger groups that they failed to notice that they are really looser groups. They belonged to what the eminent Victorian truly called the fairy-tales of science. They had neither the precision that belongs to doctrinal definition nor the practicality that belongs to daily experience. In religion and morals we all really know what we mean by a man, and in the stress of real life we all really know what we mean by an Irishman. It is by no means certain that we all know what we mean by a Celt. Hence something large and imaginative, but formless and partly imaginary, began to spread over popular sentiment with the spread of popular science. It was darker and more dubious than either the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century or the nationalism of the nineteenth. It was not so clean-cut; indeed I will venture to say that it was not so clean. It was mixed with the mud and mist, the chaotic clay and cloud, of primitive and even bestial beginnings; it had only vague visions of barbaric migrations and massacres and enslavements. It started all our recent preference for the prehistoric to the historic. All this must be remembered as an influence overshadowing the second half of the nineteenth century, because it eventually took a more pointed and controversial form which involved not only materialism but pessimism. The earlier rationalists may or may not have been materialists; but they certainly were not pessimists. They were, I admit, rather exaggerated and excessive optimists. It is none the less curious that the general revolutionary tradition, of revolt and criticism of conditions, which began with the philosophy of Rousseau, should have ended with the philosophy of Thomas Hardy.
So much for one side of this later Victorian change. But the mere mention of Hardy and the realistic rebels will remind us that it had another side, which was a very good side. Probably speaking, it consisted in turning the attention from purely political wrongs to fundamental economic wrongs. In this also Carlyle, who belongs to the earlier period, continues to colour and even control the destinies of the later. In the matter of dates Carlyle and Macaulay covered the same period. In the matter of destinies they lived in two different centuries. Macaulay was, for good and evil, entirely a man of the eighteenth century. He was a Whig as Fox had been a Whig; a patriot as Pitt had been a patriot; a Protestant as any Erastian latitudinarian Georgian parson had been a Protestant; a logician as Dr. Johnson was a logician; a historian as Gibbon was a historian. Carlyle, who had brought into history the doubtful romance of blood, also brought into politics the very real tragedy of bread. He stands at the beginning of all the best efforts of the later Victorians to face the problems of labour and hunger that had developed in the depths of the new industrial civilisation. With the great exception of Cobbett, who had stood apart and alone, misunderstood and abused by all parties, it is fair to say that Carlyle started much of the merely social unrest of conscience which has modified the evils of the later nineteenth century. It is needless here to weigh the evil against the good; or to discuss how much of a certain disinterested dignity, in the old Republicans, was lost in his practical and impatient clamour for captains and for kings. It is only necessary to insist on the reality of the contrast and the change. Grattan, a great and typical orator of the eighteenth-century ideal, had said that the Irishman might go in rags, but he must not go in chains. Ruskin and the social reformers reversed the principle, until some of the extreme Socialists, like the Marxian Communists, are now inclined to say that a man must go in chains so that he may not go in rags.
Solo che, come ho detto, il modo in cui questo romanzo razziale penetrò nella cultura vittoriana si può cogliere meglio non in un caso ovvio come Carlyle, ma in casi assai più remoti come Matthew Arnold o Meredith. Per prendere prima quest’ultimo caso: George Meredith fu in un certo senso un intellettuale interamente internazionale; un umanista liberale; un vero figlio della Rivoluzione francese, che egli celebrò in odi sontuose. Ma egli illustra l’effetto indiretto della mania razziale, che è questo: che l’altra parte spesso accettava la distinzione. Non solo il teutonista parlava dell’esser teutone, ma anche il celta parlava dell’esser celta. Gran parte del giudizio sociale di Meredith è modificata, e, a mio gusto, un po’ falsata, dalla sua insistenza nel contrapporre il sassone al celta, quando deve contrapporre l’inglese all’irlandese o al gallese. Egli spesso satireggiava nell’inglese esattamente ciò che il teutonista lodava nell’inglese; ed era spesso qualcosa che l’inglese si dà il caso non possieda. Così nell’altro caso: Matthew Arnold si fece in modo speciale e supremo l’apostolo di una cultura cosmopolita; fece un’enorme quantità di bene reale insistendo sul truismo che l’Inghilterra è una parte dell’Europa. Dava il suo meglio in un disprezzo per il disprezzo che si nutriva verso i francesi o gli irlandesi o gli italiani. Ma non riusciva a indursi a trattarli semplicemente come francesi o irlandesi o italiani. Era influenzato dalla moda universale dell’etnologia e assillato dalle generalizzazioni razziali. Quando parlava con senno relativamente eccellente dell’insensato trattamento riservato all’Irlanda, pensava a tali cose troppo come Studi Celtici e troppo poco come Studi Irlandesi. Cercò inoltre di spiegare i difetti inglesi come parte del «lievito tedesco che è in noi», e sprecò per l’antropologia ciò che era destinato allo studio del genere umano. Potremmo prendere un terzo esempio. William Morris fu da un lato un comunista e quasi tenuto a essere un internazionalista; fu dall’altro lato un medievalista, che si appellava a quell’antica bellezza che apparteneva a tutti gli europei allo stesso modo. Ma era ingombrato da un goffo desiderio di essere sassone, di trattare l’inglese come se fosse meramente la lingua rudimentale degli Angli; e spinse il suo ammiratore, Stevenson, a un’intensa irritazione scrivendo «laddove» quando intendeva soltanto «dove».
Ho menzionato questa particolare moda vittoriana, la teoria razziale della storia, come cosa primaria e cospicua, perché in genere non viene menzionata affatto. Siamo così avvezzi, leggendo resoconti moderni di cose recenti o antiche, a ricavarne l’impressione di un mondo in eterna espansione, chiamato con l’espressione fin troppo tipicamente vittoriana «il pensiero degli uomini che si allarga col procedere dei soli», che spesso dimentichiamo i molti periodi in cui il mondo si contrasse in una nuova angustia o esclusività, o il pensiero degli uomini visibilmente si rattrappì e raggrinzì sotto qualche fresca influenza d’isolamento o distinzione. Ciò fu certamente vero del tribalismo e dell’imperialismo che l’Ottocento sviluppò, a partire da un romanzo delle razze, in confronto alle prime generalizzazioni rivoluzionarie sul genere umano. Il fatto è palese, per esempio, nella storia del primo esperimento rivoluzionario: la Repubblica americana. Al tempo di Jefferson, molti di coloro che tenevano schiavi disapprovavano la schiavitù; molti di coloro che approvavano la schiavitù non l’approvavano in modo particolare in quanto schiavitù dei negri. La nozione del negro come qualcosa di peculiarmente pericoloso o pestilenziale non è un antico pregiudizio, ma una moda assai recente e in gran parte antropologica. È affine a tutto ciò che data da Darwin; e alla divulgazione, per opera di Huxley, di un tipo quasi pessimistico di evoluzione. I meridionali moderni sono assai più ostili ai negri di quanto lo fossero quando possedevano schiavi. Come sorse di recente in America la teoria antropologica che il negro è soltanto una scimmia, così sorse di recente in Europa la nozione antropologica che il polacco è soltanto uno slavo, o che l’irlandese è soltanto un celta. La gente era così orgogliosa di scoprire questi gruppi più ampi che non si accorgeva che si tratta in realtà di gruppi più vaghi. Appartenevano a ciò che l’eminente vittoriano chiamò veracemente le fiabe della scienza. Non avevano né la precisione che appartiene alla definizione dottrinale né la praticità che appartiene all’esperienza quotidiana. In religione e in morale sappiamo tutti davvero che cosa intendiamo per uomo, e nella tensione della vita reale sappiamo tutti davvero che cosa intendiamo per irlandese. Non è affatto certo che sappiamo tutti che cosa intendiamo per celta. Perciò qualcosa di ampio e immaginoso, ma informe e in parte immaginario, cominciò a stendersi sul sentimento popolare col diffondersi della scienza popolare. Era più cupo e più dubbio tanto dell’umanitarismo del Settecento quanto del nazionalismo dell’Ottocento. Non era così netto; anzi, oserò dire che non era così pulito. Era mescolato al fango e alla nebbia, alla creta e alla nube caotiche, di origini primitive e perfino bestiali; aveva soltanto vaghe visioni di migrazioni e massacri e asservimenti barbarici. Diede inizio a tutta la nostra recente preferenza per il preistorico rispetto allo storico. Tutto ciò va ricordato come un’influenza che adombrò la seconda metà dell’Ottocento, perché finì per assumere una forma più acuta e controversa che coinvolgeva non solo il materialismo ma il pessimismo. I razionalisti anteriori possono essere stati o meno materialisti; ma certo non erano pessimisti. Erano, lo ammetto, ottimisti piuttosto esagerati ed eccessivi. Non è per questo meno curioso che la generale tradizione rivoluzionaria, di rivolta e critica delle condizioni, che cominciò con la filosofia di Rousseau, sia finita con la filosofia di Thomas Hardy.
Tanto basti per un lato di questo mutamento tardo-vittoriano. Ma la sola menzione di Hardy e dei ribelli realisti ci ricorderà che esso ebbe un altro lato, che fu un lato assai buono. In termini approssimativi, esso consistette nel distogliere l’attenzione dai torti puramente politici verso i torti economici fondamentali. Anche in questo Carlyle, che appartiene al periodo anteriore, continua a colorare e perfino a governare le sorti di quello posteriore. In materia di date, Carlyle e Macaulay coprirono lo stesso periodo. In materia di destini, vissero in due secoli diversi. Macaulay fu, nel bene e nel male, interamente un uomo del Settecento. Fu un Whig come Fox era stato un Whig; un patriota come Pitt era stato un patriota; un protestante come lo era stato un qualsiasi pastore georgiano erastiano e latitudinario; un logico come lo era il Dr. Johnson; uno storico come lo era Gibbon. Carlyle, che aveva portato nella storia il dubbio romanzo del sangue, portò anche nella politica la ben reale tragedia del pane. Egli sta all’inizio di tutti i migliori sforzi dei vittoriani più tardi per affrontare i problemi del lavoro e della fame che si erano sviluppati nelle profondità della nuova civiltà industriale. Con la grande eccezione di Cobbett, che era rimasto in disparte e solo, frainteso e vilipeso da tutti i partiti, è giusto dire che Carlyle diede avvio a gran parte del semplice fermento sociale della coscienza che ha mitigato i mali del tardo Ottocento. È qui superfluo soppesare il male contro il bene; o discutere quanta di una certa disinteressata dignità, nei vecchi repubblicani, sia andata perduta nel suo pratico e impaziente clamore per capitani e per re. Basta soltanto insistere sulla realtà del contrasto e del mutamento. Grattan, un grande e tipico oratore dell’ideale settecentesco, aveva detto che l’irlandese poteva pure andare in stracci, ma non doveva andare in catene. Ruskin e i riformatori sociali rovesciarono il principio, finché alcuni dei socialisti estremi, come i comunisti marxisti, sono ora inclini a dire che un uomo deve andare in catene affinché non abbia ad andare in stracci.
Ruskin was the heir and representative of Carlyle in this later and better Victorian development. It is unnecessary to react against romanticism to such an extent as a recent critic, who summed up Ruskin in a book on the Victorians by saying that at least his economics were all scientifically sound though he could not write for toffee. He certainly could not write in that stately modern style in which toffee figures as the prize of writing. When the critic suggests that he could not write, it merely means that the critic does not like that particular sort of writing, which proves rather the limitations of the critic than the incapacities of the writer. Ruskin certainly wrote poetical prose, which may not for the moment be fashionable in an age of prosaic poetry. But to say that it is not good poetical prose is simply to be ignorant of the varied possibilities of good writing. It is also true that what he did he overdid, which is largely true of the whole of this highly coloured and romantic final development of Victorianism. Even those few who deliberately tried to correct it by understatement managed somehow to overstate their understatement. Matthew Arnold deliberately endeavoured to introduce a French classical balance and critical detachment into English letters. The consequence was that he was called a prig, which was unjust but not unthinkable; whereas no Frenchman reading Saint-Beuve ever thought of thinking that he was a prig. Walter Pater wished to create an art criticism more detached than that of Ruskin; but he did in fact manage to create the impression of being artificial as well as artistic. It was very difficult to be classic in the later Victorian atmosphere. There was a romantic unrest about it, so that even the umpires were competitive and combative. The loss of a natural repose, in Latin logic or French clarity, was one of the penalties of parting with the spirit of the eighteenth century. Another mark of it was the growth of an intellectual individualism which expressed itself, not only in being outré, but actually in being obscure. Browning and Meredith were among the very greatest of Victorians; and over both of them brooded that cloud I have described as coming up to over-shadow the epoch; and though it was coloured gorgeously like a cloud of sunset, it none the less came between many people and the sun.
George Meredith largely stood alone; but he stood as it were representing many others who had also a taste for standing alone. All this last phase is full of men whom it is interesting to remember and yet very easy to forget. It was because of the individualistic isolation of their talents and even their topics. An example is Richard Jefferies, who was “The Gamekeeper At Home”; or T. E. Brown, who made a niche for himself that is somehow at once obscure and popular: or William de Morgan, who with English eccentricity took up literature as a hobby for old age. The danger of all grouping is that we may miss too many of these men who did not fit into groups. Nevertheless, there are two or three groups which may be said to bulk biggest in the period—the period after the triumph of Tennyson and Browning in poetry, or Dickens and Thackeray in fiction. First there appears, primarily through the influence of Ruskin, what was called the Pre-Raphaelite Group; which began with a Ruskinian version of Christian medievalism and shaded off into later forms of aestheticism, not to say Paganism. The leader, who was also the link, was Rossetti, who accepted with delight the medieval pattern, but blazoned it with bolder and warmer colours than some of the literal Pre-Raphaelites would have approved. With him went his sister Christina, who was medieval in the more orthodox sense; and, in a manner very much his own, William Morris, who made the medieval form the expression of modern discontents and social ideals, instead of Christina Rossetti’s religious ideals. The queer transition of the Pre-Raphaelites from a revival of Christianity to a revival of Paganism is complete in the poet Swinburne, who belonged to the set, yet had little in common with the sect. That it had Ruskin at one end and Swinburne at the other illustrates how loose a thing a group is, especially in English literature. Swinburne had three phases; one in which he wrote the best poetry in the worst spirits, or mood or frame of mind for his beautiful boyish singing is not merely in praise of Paganism, but definitely of Pessimism. There is a second period when his spirits are a little better and his poetry a little worse; the period of his political enthusiasm for United Italy and Victor Hugo and the resounding qualities of the word Republic. There is, unfortunately, a third period, in which he imitated himself and did it badly. But the point to seize is that, in his great hour, Swinburne was a spell; he held people like a magic flute, till they forgot that there was any other melody in the world. It is thoroughly typical of such glamours that there has been a violent and very unreasonable reaction against his unreasonable power. With him and Walter Pater the movement ends in its last pagan phase; save perhaps for the queer aestheticism that later became a decadent dandyism in Oscar Wilde.
But already new groups were making this one look old. One was what may be called the Picaresque or Adventurous Group, but may be more recognisable as the group of Stevenson and Henley. Both for good and evil, they reacted into a robust blood-and-thunder literature, which, in the case of Stevenson, who was not only the greater but much the more amiable and balanced of the two, was as blameless as it was bloody. There was, however, a dangerous double use of the very word “blood”. And, quaintly enough, the more dubious element is to be found rather in blood than in bloodshed. The blood that spatters the pages of Treasure Island can only promote a respect for the real virtues of courage or loyalty. The blood that is not shed at all, but remains in the human body, was used to encourage a respect for the real vices and weaknesses of pride and racial contempt. For one important point about this group is this: that through them, or some of them, there came into full power and possession that curious religion of Race, which I have described as developing from Teutonic sources a little time before. It is not to be confused with patriotism or the unselfish love of one’s country. It is a mere pride in being oneself of a certain real or imaginary race or stock. The Frenchman loves France as if she were a woman; the Nordic Man merely loves himself for being a Nordic Man. This weakness did to some extent spoil the spirited attempt of Henley and his school of masculine critics; I mean their very just attempt to show that letters should be red-blooded, as against the green-blooded pessimism of the decadents. But whatever their weaknesses, they did fill the age with a new change and stir, and gave to the pessimists something which if not a cure, was at least an antidote and a counter-irritant. The earliest and best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling came to them like a new breath of prophecy and promise; Sir Henry Newbolt supported the chorus with two or three of the very finest modern English lyrics. There was a general fashion of patriotic poetry, as well as of Jingo journalism—in verse or otherwise. It was the only point on which that strongest and most virile of the pessimists, the Shropshire Lad, could be moved for a moment to a slightly blasphemous cheerfulness. John Davidson, a dark Scot in a dark and even dim state of revolt against everything, also was ready to follow the flag and revolt against everything except the Empire. The point of all this is not that patriotism revived, for the older poets and critics took patriotism for granted: but that the special type of tribal imperialism sprang out of that rather barbaric root of Race, already noted as a romance of science, which reacted against the rationalism of the Revolution.
Ruskin fu l’erede e il rappresentante di Carlyle in questo più tardo e migliore sviluppo vittoriano. Non occorre reagire contro il romanticismo al punto di un recente critico, che riassunse Ruskin in un libro sui vittoriani dicendo che almeno la sua economia era tutta scientificamente fondata, benché egli non sapesse scrivere per un accidente. Certo non sapeva scrivere in quello sfarzoso stile moderno in cui l’accidente figura come premio dello scrivere. Quando il critico insinua che egli non sapeva scrivere, ciò significa soltanto che al critico non piace quel particolare genere di scrittura, il che prova piuttosto i limiti del critico che le incapacità dello scrittore. Ruskin scrisse certamente una prosa poetica, che per il momento può non essere di moda in un’età di poesia prosaica. Ma dire che non è buona prosa poetica è semplicemente ignorare le svariate possibilità del buon scrivere. È anche vero che ciò che fece lo fece all’eccesso, il che è largamente vero dell’intero sviluppo finale, così vivamente colorato e romantico, del vittorianesimo. Perfino quei pochi che deliberatamente cercarono di correggerlo con la reticenza riuscirono in qualche modo a esagerare la loro reticenza. Matthew Arnold si sforzò deliberatamente d’introdurre un equilibrio classico francese e un distacco critico nelle lettere inglesi. La conseguenza fu che lo si chiamò un saccente, il che era ingiusto ma non impensabile; laddove nessun francese leggendo Sainte-Beuve pensò mai di ritenerlo un saccente. Walter Pater desiderò creare una critica d’arte più distaccata di quella di Ruskin; ma in realtà riuscì a creare l’impressione di essere artificioso oltre che artistico. Era assai difficile essere classici nell’atmosfera tardo-vittoriana. Vi era in essa un’inquietudine romantica, tanto che perfino gli arbitri erano competitivi e combattivi. La perdita di una naturale quiete, nella logica latina o nella chiarezza francese, fu una delle penali del separarsi dallo spirito del Settecento. Un altro suo segno fu la crescita di un individualismo intellettuale che si esprimeva non solo nell’essere stravagante, ma addirittura nell’essere oscuro. Browning e Meredith furono tra i massimi dei vittoriani; e su entrambi incombeva quella nube che ho descritto come ergentesi a fare ombra all’epoca; e benché fosse colorata sfarzosamente come una nube al tramonto, ciò nondimeno si frapponeva tra molta gente e il sole.
George Meredith stette in gran parte solo; ma stette per così dire a rappresentare molti altri che avevano anch’essi la propensione a stare soli. Tutta quest’ultima fase è piena di uomini che è interessante ricordare e pure assai facile dimenticare. Ciò per via dell’isolamento individualistico dei loro talenti e perfino dei loro argomenti. Un esempio è Richard Jefferies, che fu «The Gamekeeper At Home»; o T. E. Brown, che si ritagliò una nicchia in qualche modo al tempo stesso oscura e popolare; o William de Morgan, che con eccentricità inglese prese la letteratura come passatempo della vecchiaia. Il pericolo di ogni raggruppamento è che possiamo lasciarci sfuggire troppi di questi uomini che non rientravano nei gruppi. Ciò nondimeno, vi sono due o tre gruppi che si può dire facciano la massa maggiore nel periodo: il periodo successivo al trionfo di Tennyson e Browning nella poesia, o di Dickens e Thackeray nella narrativa. Dapprima compare, principalmente per influsso di Ruskin, quello che fu chiamato il Gruppo dei Preraffaelliti; che cominciò con una versione ruskiniana del medievalismo cristiano e sfumò in forme posteriori di estetismo, per non dire di paganesimo. Il capo, che era anche l’anello di congiunzione, fu Rossetti, che accettò con gioia il modello medievale, ma lo blasonò con colori più arditi e più caldi di quanto alcuni dei preraffaelliti letterali avrebbero approvato. Con lui andò sua sorella Christina, che fu medievale nel senso più ortodosso; e, in una maniera tutta sua, William Morris, che fece della forma medievale l’espressione di scontenti moderni e ideali sociali, anziché degli ideali religiosi di Christina Rossetti. La bizzarra transizione dei preraffaelliti da un revival del Cristianesimo a un revival del paganesimo è completa nel poeta Swinburne, che apparteneva al circolo, eppure aveva poco in comune con la setta. Che avesse Ruskin a un capo e Swinburne all’altro illustra quanto sia lasca cosa un gruppo, specialmente nella letteratura inglese. Swinburne ebbe tre fasi; una in cui scrisse la poesia migliore con lo spirito peggiore, o l’umore o la disposizione d’animo, giacché il suo bel canto giovanile non è meramente in lode del paganesimo, ma decisamente del pessimismo. Vi è un secondo periodo in cui il suo spirito è un po’ migliore e la sua poesia un po’ peggiore; il periodo del suo entusiasmo politico per l’Italia unita e per Victor Hugo e per le sonanti qualità della parola Repubblica. Vi è, purtroppo, un terzo periodo, in cui imitò se stesso e lo fece male. Ma il punto da cogliere è che, nella sua grande ora, Swinburne fu un incantesimo; teneva la gente come un flauto magico, finché essa dimenticava che ci fosse al mondo qualsiasi altra melodia. È del tutto tipico di simili fascini che vi sia stata una violenta e assai irragionevole reazione contro il suo irragionevole potere. Con lui e con Walter Pater il movimento termina nella sua ultima fase pagana; salvo forse per lo strano estetismo che più tardi divenne un decadente dandismo in Oscar Wilde.
Ma già nuovi gruppi facevano apparire vecchio questo. Uno fu quello che si può chiamare il Gruppo Picaresco o dell’Avventura, ma può essere più riconoscibile come il gruppo di Stevenson e Henley. Nel bene come nel male, essi reagirono in una robusta letteratura di sangue e tuoni che, nel caso di Stevenson, il quale non solo era il maggiore ma di gran lunga il più amabile ed equilibrato dei due, fu tanto irreprensibile quanto era cruenta. Vi era, tuttavia, un pericoloso duplice uso della parola stessa «sangue». E, abbastanza curiosamente, l’elemento più dubbio si trova nel sangue piuttosto che nello spargimento di sangue. Il sangue che schizza sulle pagine de «L’isola del tesoro» non può che promuovere il rispetto per le vere virtù del coraggio o della lealtà. Il sangue che non viene affatto versato, ma rimane nel corpo umano, fu usato per incoraggiare il rispetto per i veri vizi e le vere debolezze dell’orgoglio e del disprezzo razziale. Poiché un punto importante di questo gruppo è questo: che attraverso di essi, o alcuni di essi, entrò in piena potenza e possesso quella curiosa religione della Razza che ho descritto come sviluppatasi da fonti teutoniche un po’ di tempo prima. Non va confusa con il patriottismo o con l’altruistico amore del proprio paese. È un mero orgoglio di essere se stessi di una certa razza o stirpe, reale o immaginaria. Il francese ama la Francia come se fosse una donna; l’Uomo Nordico ama meramente se stesso per essere un Uomo Nordico. Questa debolezza guastò in qualche misura lo spirito con cui Henley e la sua scuola di critici virili tentarono; intendo il loro giustissimo tentativo di mostrare che le lettere dovrebbero avere sangue rosso, in contrapposizione al pessimismo dal sangue verde dei decadenti. Ma quali che fossero le loro debolezze, riempirono davvero l’età di un nuovo mutamento e fermento, e diedero ai pessimisti qualcosa che, se non una cura, era almeno un antidoto e un contro-irritante. La prima e migliore opera del signor Rudyard Kipling giunse a loro come un nuovo soffio di profezia e di promessa; Sir Henry Newbolt sostenne il coro con due o tre delle più belle liriche inglesi moderne. Vi era una generale moda di poesia patriottica, oltre che di giornalismo sciovinista, in versi o altrimenti. Fu l’unico punto su cui quel più forte e più virile dei pessimisti, il Giovane dello Shropshire, poté essere mosso per un momento a un’allegria lievemente blasfema. John Davidson, un cupo scozzese in uno stato di rivolta cupo e perfino fosco contro ogni cosa, era anch’egli pronto a seguire la bandiera e a rivoltarsi contro tutto tranne che contro l’Impero. Il punto di tutto ciò non è che il patriottismo risorse, giacché i poeti e i critici più anziani davano il patriottismo per scontato: ma che il particolare tipo d’imperialismo tribale sbucò da quella radice piuttosto barbarica della Razza, già notata come un romanzo della scienza, che reagì contro il razionalismo della Rivoluzione.
Fortunately, from the same Stevenson and Henley stock of ideas, came another idea that also filled the age. It came from Stevenson alone, as distinct from Newbolt, Henley, Kipling and the rest, and may be called the cult of the child, but especially of the boy. It would be putting it too harshly, perhaps, to say that Stevenson wanted to go on playing at robbers; whereas Henley and the Imperialists wanted to be robbers. Anyhow, Stevenson saw the fun of what he was doing when be made the child say that he was the captain of a tidy little ship; whereas it is, I believe, the inscrutable fact that Henley did not see any fun in what he was doing when he adjured John Bull to “Storm along, John”, and assured that public character that the whole world would soon be his own. Through Stevenson’s truly magic lantern, which he described in The Lantern-Bearers, there shone a true reillumination of the mystical melodrama of childhood. And in that light many followed to the same sort of fairyland; notably Sir James Barrie, who introduced a sort of irony into fairyland. He continued what may be called the Stevensonian stereoscopic view; the looking at the same object in a double fashion, with the eye of the adult and of the child. But it was mostly through a string of accidental friendships that this fantastic element was connected with the more realistic of the robust school, though of course there were many brilliant individuals who could only be placed with or near that group. Thus Joseph Conrad, though a Pole, was connected with it by his record of hard or violent adventure at sea; and Mr. John Masefield, though he wrote later and longer poems of rural sport or religion, began with rousing sea songs of the buccaneers.
Already, however, a new voice had been heard, and a new influence balanced or rebuked an influence like that of Kipling; and it was a voice from a more remote elfland than the elfland of Peter Pan. Stevenson himself said that he had twice in poetry heard a new note or a unique and arresting voice: once when he read Love In A Valley by George Meredith; and once again when he read some verses called The Lake Island of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats. Yet it is worth remarking that there still remained this curious persistence of the romance of race, even in what was so naturally hostile to the popular romance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The appearance of a new cultural nucleus in Dublin, while it derived something from the Pre-Raphaelites, and therefore something from the Victorians, was so far Victorian in this special respect, that it managed to get entangled like all the rest with an ethnological term: the term “Celtic”. It did not even substitute the old Irish term “Gaelic”. It is true that Mr. Yeats himself, the founder of the school and one of the first poets of recent times, did not really base his own case on anthropology, but rather on history and (very rightly) even more on legend. But it marks the racial influence already described that the word “Celtic” stuck to the movement, which was really a revival of remote legend and a gentle heathenism of the hills. It also explains why there was some reaction against it even in its own home. There are many who came not to care very much about the Celtic Twilight, who have lived to see the Irish Dawn.
About this time, or a little later, in England, there appeared a group formally called Minor Poets; though one of them was certainly a Major Poet. He was classed at the time with John Davidson and Sir William Watson, both of them very genuine poets in their own style; and there is some charming lyricism in their contemporaries, Norman Gale and Richard le Gallienne. Two other writers of fine verse really belong to this period: Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. But I think it fair to say that Francis Thompson, thus classed as one of them, was of another and altogether higher class. He owed something to Coventry Patmore, one of the most really original Victorians, and something to Alice Meynell, a woman who was a poet (not a poetess) of the sort that women were least supposed to be; an intrinsically intellectual poet. But even of these friends he was free; with all the freedom of a creative and supremely productive or fertile genius. His imagery was so imaginative as to be almost crowded; and, in a different sense from the more analytical Victorians, dark with excess of light. Because he was Catholic many would expect him to be Gothic; but there was something in his exuberance that resembled rather the very best of the Baroque.
The necessity of marking the period by moods has led us here to mark it too exclusively by poets, who are the only permanent record of moods. It need not be said that work of another and what some think a more solid sort had been going forward in those last years; some of it very solid indeed, certainly in the best and perhaps also in the more questionable sense. Fiction, for instance, had followed other guides besides romance. The immense influence of Thomas Hardy was there; with his strong sense of the truth of the earth, as also of the tragedy of the dust. It had set many able men working in a mine of realism. The two ablest and most typical in this tradition were Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. If I do not speak here at length of men of genius like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, it is because they are in a sense the opening of another world, and are most vividly lit up by the glare of the Great War and the existing social perils; and these things really mark the close of the period. For an appalling apocalypse came upon all life, and therefore upon all literature; and the most fitting emblems of such splendour and terror, and the arts of peace torn across, and youth going to its death singing, remain with the last few poems of Rupert Brooke.
Fortunatamente, dallo stesso ceppo di idee di Stevenson e Henley, venne un’altra idea che pure riempì l’età. Venne da Stevenson soltanto, distintamente da Newbolt, Henley, Kipling e gli altri, e può essere chiamata il culto del fanciullo, ma specialmente del ragazzo. Sarebbe dirla troppo aspramente, forse, dire che Stevenson voleva continuare a giocare ai briganti; laddove Henley e gli imperialisti volevano essere briganti. Comunque, Stevenson vedeva il divertimento di ciò che faceva quando fece dire al fanciullo di essere il capitano di una linda navicella; laddove è, credo, l’imperscrutabile fatto che Henley non vedeva alcun divertimento in ciò che faceva quando esortava John Bull a «Avanza a tempesta, John», e assicurava a quel personaggio pubblico che il mondo intero sarebbe presto stato suo. Attraverso la lanterna davvero magica di Stevenson, che egli descrisse in «The Lantern-Bearers», risplendeva una vera riaccensione del mistico melodramma dell’infanzia. E in quella luce molti seguirono verso lo stesso genere di paese delle fate; segnatamente Sir James Barrie, che introdusse una sorta d’ironia nel paese delle fate. Egli continuò quella che si può chiamare la stereoscopica visione stevensoniana; il guardare al medesimo oggetto in duplice modo, con l’occhio dell’adulto e con quello del fanciullo. Ma fu per lo più attraverso una serie di amicizie accidentali che questo elemento fantastico venne collegato con i più realisti della robusta scuola, benché naturalmente vi fossero molti brillanti individui che si potevano collocare solo con quel gruppo o presso di esso. Così Joseph Conrad, benché polacco, vi fu collegato dal suo repertorio di dura o violenta avventura in mare; e il signor John Masefield, benché scrivesse più tardi e più lunghi poemi di sport rurale o di religione, cominciò con travolgenti canti marinareschi di bucanieri.
Già, tuttavia, una nuova voce s’era udita, e una nuova influenza bilanciava o rimproverava un’influenza come quella di Kipling; ed era una voce da un paese degli elfi più remoto del paese degli elfi di Peter Pan. Stevenson stesso disse d’aver udito due volte, in poesia, una nuova nota o una voce unica e arrestante: una volta quando lesse «Amore in una valle» di George Meredith; e un’altra volta quando lesse certi versi intitolati «L’isola lacustre di Innisfree» di William Butler Yeats. Eppure vale la pena notare che tuttora permaneva questa curiosa persistenza del romanzo della razza, perfino in ciò che era così naturalmente ostile al popolare romanzo della razza anglosassone. La comparsa di un nuovo nucleo culturale a Dublino, pur derivando qualcosa dai preraffaelliti, e perciò qualcosa dai vittoriani, fu vittoriana fin qui in questo particolare aspetto: che riuscì a impigliarsi come tutto il resto in un termine etnologico: il termine «celtico». Non sostituì neppure il vecchio termine irlandese «gaelico». È vero che il signor Yeats stesso, il fondatore della scuola e uno dei primi poeti dei tempi recenti, non basava in realtà il proprio caso sull’antropologia, ma piuttosto sulla storia e (assai giustamente) ancor più sulla leggenda. Ma segna l’influenza razziale già descritta il fatto che la parola «celtico» si appiccicò al movimento, che era in realtà un revival di remota leggenda e un mite paganesimo delle colline. Spiega anche perché vi fu una qualche reazione contro di esso perfino nella sua propria patria. Vi sono molti che finirono per non curarsi granché del Crepuscolo Celtico, e che sono vissuti tanto da vedere l’Alba irlandese.
Verso questo tempo, o un po’ più tardi, in Inghilterra, comparve un gruppo formalmente chiamato dei Poeti Minori; benché uno di essi fosse certamente un Poeta Maggiore. Al tempo fu classificato con John Davidson e Sir William Watson, entrambi poeti assai genuini nel loro stile; e vi è un incantevole lirismo nei loro contemporanei, Norman Gale e Richard le Gallienne. Due altri scrittori di bei versi appartengono davvero a questo periodo: Ernest Dowson e Lionel Johnson. Ma penso sia giusto dire che Francis Thompson, così classificato come uno di essi, fu di un’altra e del tutto più alta classe. Dovette qualcosa a Coventry Patmore, uno dei più davvero originali vittoriani, e qualcosa ad Alice Meynell, una donna che era un poeta (non una poetessa) del genere che le donne meno si supponeva potessero essere; un poeta intrinsecamente intellettuale. Ma perfino di questi amici fu libero; con tutta la libertà di un genio creativo e supremamente produttivo o fertile. La sua immaginazione era così immaginosa da essere quasi affollata; e, in un senso diverso da quello dei più analitici vittoriani, buia per eccesso di luce. Poiché era cattolico, molti si aspetterebbero che fosse gotico; ma vi era nella sua esuberanza qualcosa che assomigliava piuttosto al meglio del Barocco.
La necessità di segnare il periodo per mezzo di umori ci ha portati qui a segnarlo troppo esclusivamente per mezzo di poeti, che sono l’unica traccia permanente degli umori. Non c’è bisogno di dire che un’opera di altro genere, e da alcuni ritenuta di genere più solido, era andata avanti in quegli ultimi anni; parte di essa davvero assai solida, certo nel senso migliore e forse anche in quello più discutibile. La narrativa, per esempio, aveva seguito altre guide oltre al romanzo. C’era l’immensa influenza di Thomas Hardy; col suo forte senso della verità della terra, come anche della tragedia della polvere. Aveva messo molti uomini capaci a lavorare in una miniera di realismo. I due più capaci e più tipici in questa tradizione furono Arnold Bennett e John Galsworthy. Se non parlo qui a lungo di uomini di genio come H. G. Wells e Bernard Shaw, è perché essi sono in un certo senso l’apertura di un altro mondo, e sono illuminati nel modo più vivido dal bagliore della Grande Guerra e dei pericoli sociali esistenti; e queste cose segnano davvero la chiusura del periodo. Poiché una spaventosa apocalisse calò su tutta la vita, e perciò su tutta la letteratura; e i più adatti emblemi di tale splendore e terrore, e delle arti della pace lacerate, e della giovinezza che va alla sua morte cantando, rimangono con gli ultimi pochi poemi di Rupert Brooke.
THE DANGERS OF NECROMANCY
We often lament that the world is divided into sects, all with different narrow ideas. The real trouble is that they all have different broad ideas. It is when it comes to being broadminded that they are most narrow, or at any rate most different. It is their generalisations that cut across each other. The Buddhist believes he is broadminded when he says that all efforts at personal achievement and finality, east or west, Christian or Buddhist, are equally vain and hopeless. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper India. A modern agnostic thinks he is broadminded when he says that all religions or revelations, Catholic or Protestant, savage or civilised, are alike mere myths and guesses at what man can never know. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper Tooting. My idea of broadmindedness is to sympathise with so many of these separate spiritual atmospheres as possible; to respect or love the Buddhists of Tibet or the agnostics of Tooting for their many real virtues and capacities, but to have a philosophy which explains each of them in turn and does not merely generalise from one of them. This I have found in the Catholic philosophy; but that is not the question here, except in so far as there is, I think, just this difference: that the largeness of the other schemes is an unreal largeness of generalisation, whereas the largeness of our scheme is a real largeness of experience. Anybody can say that all Africans are black, but it is not the same as having a wide experience of Africa.
This difference about the obvious in generalisation struck me sharply, and with some amusement, in a debate on Spiritualism in the Daily News. A well-known secularist said that it is all very well to say that scientific men and intelligent people accept Spiritualism; but (he added, as with a sort of hiss) remember that wise men for ages actually accepted Witchcraft. He returned more than once to this biting and blasting word; and the argument obviously was, “Modern spirit-rapping by men like Lodge may look very plausible and scientific; but a ghastly fate awaits you; you will be the derision of history; you will be compared to the brutal, brainless, bestially ignorant people who believed in Witchcraft. Ha, ha, how will you like that?”
Now all this makes me smile in a sad but broad-minded manner. Because it seems to me to be quite the other way. I am not by any means certain, one way or the other, that there is really such a thing as Spirit-rapping. I am absolutely certain that there is such a thing as Witchcraft. I impute a belief in it to common sense, to experience and the records of experience, and to a broad view of humanity as a whole. I impute disbelief in it to inexperience, to provincial ignorance, to local limitations, and all the vices that balance the virtues of Tooting. Common sense will show that the habit of invoking evil spirits, often because they were evil, has existed in far too vast a variety of different cultures, classes and social conditions to be a chance piece of childish credulity. Experience will show that it is not true that it disappears everywhere before the advance of education; on the contrary, some of its most evil ministers have been the most highly educated. Record will show that it is not true that it marks barbarism rather than civilisation; there was more devil-worship in the cities of Hannibal and Montezuma than among the Esquimaux or the Australian bushmen. And any real knowledge of modern cities will show that it is going on in London and Paris today.
The truth is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had their little local limitations, which are already breaking down. Wishing to expel the superhuman and exalt the human, they grossly simplified the human. The great Huxley (on whose name be praise) said in the innocence of his heart, “It may be doubted if any man ever really said, ‘Evil, be thou my good.’” He could not believe that any scepticism could touch common morality, by which he really meant Christian morality. But such innocence is also ignorance. Nothing is more certain than that certain highly lucid, cultivated and deliberate men have said, “Evil, be thou my good”; men like Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade. Please God they repented in the end, but the point is that they did pursue evil; not pleasure, or excess of pleasure, or sex or sensuality, but evil. And it is quite certain that some pursued it beyond the bounds of this world; and called evil forces from beyond. There is very good evidence that some of them got what they asked for.
Now a Catholic starts with all this realistic experience of humanity and history. A Spiritualist generally starts with the recent nineteenth-century optimism, in which his creed was born, which vaguely assumes that if there is anything spiritual, it is happier, higher, lovelier and loftier than anything we yet know; and so opens all the doors and windows for the spiritual world to flow in. But we think this is just as simple an ignorance as if an eighteenth-century sentimentalist, reading into Rousseau a notion that savage man is like Adam in Eden, had gone to live in the Cannibal Islands to be surrounded with happiness and virtue. He would be surrounded, perhaps, but in a more bodily and unpleasant sense. One sentimental fashion may assume there are no cannibals; another optimistic fashion that there are no devil-worshippers— or no devils. But there are. That is the fact of experience that is the key to many mysteries, including the mysterious policy of the Roman Catholic Church.
I PERICOLI DELLA NEGROMANZIA
Ci lamentiamo spesso che il mondo sia diviso in sette, ciascuna con le proprie idee anguste e diverse. Il guaio vero è che ciascuna ha le proprie idee ampie e diverse. È quando si tratta di essere di larghe vedute che risultano più anguste, o quantomeno più discordi. Sono le loro generalizzazioni a tagliarsi l’un l’altra. Il buddhista si crede di larghe vedute quando afferma che tutti gli sforzi verso la realizzazione personale e la compiutezza, in oriente come in occidente, cristiani o buddhisti, sono ugualmente vani e senza speranza. Ma io penso che questa sia una negazione angusta, nata da speciali condizioni spirituali dell’Alta India. Un agnostico moderno si crede di larghe vedute quando afferma che tutte le religioni o le rivelazioni, cattoliche o protestanti, selvagge o civili, sono egualmente semplici miti e congetture su ciò che l’uomo non potrà mai conoscere. Ma io penso che questa sia una negazione angusta, nata da speciali condizioni spirituali dell’Alta Tooting. La mia idea di larghezza di vedute consiste nel simpatizzare col maggior numero possibile di queste distinte atmosfere spirituali; nel rispettare o amare i buddhisti del Tibet o gli agnostici di Tooting per le loro molte virtù e capacità reali, ma nel possedere una filosofia che spieghi ciascuno di essi a sua volta e non si limiti a generalizzare a partire da uno solo. Questo l’ho trovato nella filosofia cattolica; ma non è questo il punto in discussione qui, se non nella misura in cui esiste, credo, proprio questa differenza: che la vastità degli altri schemi è una vastità irreale di generalizzazione, mentre la vastità del nostro schema è una vastità reale di esperienza. Chiunque può dire che tutti gli africani sono neri, ma non è la stessa cosa che avere una larga esperienza dell’Africa.
Questa differenza a proposito dell’ovvio nella generalizzazione mi colpì vivamente, e con un certo divertimento, in un dibattito sullo Spiritismo apparso sul Daily News. Un noto laicista disse che è tutto molto bello sostenere che gli uomini di scienza e le persone intelligenti accettano lo Spiritismo; ma (aggiunse, quasi con una sorta di sibilo) si ricordi che per secoli uomini saggi accettarono realmente la Stregoneria. Tornò più di una volta su questa parola mordace e fulminante; e l’argomento era evidentemente questo: «Il moderno spiritismo dei tavolini battenti, praticato da uomini come Lodge, può sembrare molto plausibile e scientifico; ma un destino spaventoso vi attende; sarete la derisione della storia; sarete paragonati a quella gente brutale, ottusa, bestialmente ignorante che credeva nella Stregoneria. Ah, ah, come vi garberà tutto questo?».
Ora, tutto ciò mi fa sorridere in modo triste ma di larghe vedute. Perché mi sembra che stia esattamente al contrario. Non sono affatto certo, in un senso o nell’altro, che esista davvero una cosa come lo spiritismo dei tavolini battenti. Sono invece assolutamente certo che esista una cosa come la Stregoneria. La fede in essa la attribuisco al buon senso, all’esperienza e ai documenti dell’esperienza, e a una larga visione dell’umanità nel suo insieme. L’incredulità in essa la attribuisco all’inesperienza, all’ignoranza provinciale, alle limitazioni locali e a tutti i vizi che fanno da contrappeso alle virtù di Tooting. Il buon senso mostrerà che l’abitudine di invocare gli spiriti maligni, spesso proprio perché erano maligni, è esistita in una varietà troppo vasta di culture, classi e condizioni sociali diverse per essere un fortuito frammento di credulità infantile. L’esperienza mostrerà che non è vero che essa scompaia dappertutto dinanzi all’avanzata dell’istruzione; al contrario, alcuni dei suoi ministri più malvagi sono stati i più altamente istruiti. La documentazione mostrerà che non è vero che essa contrassegni la barbarie piuttosto che la civiltà; c’era più culto del diavolo nelle città di Annibale e di Montezuma che tra gli Esquimesi o gli aborigeni australiani. E qualsiasi reale conoscenza delle città moderne mostrerà che esso prosegue oggi a Londra e a Parigi.
La verità è che il diciottesimo e il diciannovesimo secolo ebbero le loro piccole limitazioni locali, che stanno già crollando. Volendo espellere il sovrumano ed esaltare l’umano, semplificarono grossolanamente l’umano. Il grande Huxley (sia lode al suo nome) disse nell’innocenza del suo cuore: «Si può dubitare che alcun uomo abbia mai detto davvero: “Male, sii tu il mio bene”». Non poteva credere che alcuno scetticismo potesse intaccare la morale comune, con la quale intendeva in realtà la morale cristiana. Ma una tale innocenza è anche ignoranza. Nulla è più certo del fatto che certi uomini altamente lucidi, colti e deliberati abbiano detto: «Male, sii tu il mio bene»; uomini come Gilles de Rais e il marchese de Sade. Voglia Dio che alla fine si siano pentiti, ma il punto è che essi perseguirono davvero il male; non il piacere, o l’eccesso di piacere, o il sesso o la sensualità, ma il male. Ed è del tutto certo che alcuni lo perseguirono al di là dei confini di questo mondo; e chiamarono forze maligne dall’aldilà. Vi sono ottime prove che alcuni di loro ottennero ciò che avevano chiesto.
Ora, un cattolico parte da tutta questa esperienza realistica dell’umanità e della storia. Uno spiritista parte generalmente dal recente ottimismo ottocentesco, in cui nacque il suo credo, il quale presume vagamente che, se esiste qualcosa di spirituale, esso sia più felice, più alto, più amabile e più sublime di qualunque cosa noi ancora conosciamo; e così spalanca tutte le porte e le finestre perché il mondo spirituale vi affluisca. Ma noi riteniamo che questa sia un’ignoranza altrettanto ingenua che se un sentimentale del Settecento, leggendo in Rousseau l’idea che l’uomo selvaggio sia come Adamo nell’Eden, fosse andato a vivere nelle Isole dei Cannibali per trovarsi circondato di felicità e virtù. Ne sarebbe circondato, forse, ma in un senso più corporeo e sgradevole. Una moda sentimentale può presumere che non vi siano cannibali; un’altra moda ottimistica che non vi siano adoratori del diavolo — o che non vi siano diavoli. Ma vi sono. Questo è il dato di esperienza che è la chiave di molti misteri, compresa la misteriosa politica della Chiesa cattolica.
GIOTTO AND ST. FRANCIS
St. Francis of Assisi has been for ages a popular saint; in our own age he has for the first time been in some danger of being a fashionable saint. That sort of distinction of the drawing-rooms, which is said to have been a temptation rejected by many saints in their lifetime, which is certainly a peril besetting most popular preachers all their lives, has come at last to this popular preacher six hundred years after his death. It is natural that artists should be interested in the poet who was practically the founder of medieval and therefore of modern art. And it is only too true that, wherever we admit the artist, it is very difficult to exclude the aesthete. This sort of light literary fuss, though often sincere as a sentiment and even valuable as a tribute, is the very opposite of that sort of solid and traditional popularity which St. Francis had among countless generations of peasants. There is something about peasant traditions, and even about peasant legends, which knows how to keep close to the earth. It is a mark of true folklore that even the tale that is evidently wild is eminently sane. We see this in the most extravagant stories of the saints, if we compare them with the extravagant theories of the sophists and the sentimentalists. Take, for instance, that most beautiful attribute for which St. Francis is rightly loved throughout the modern world: his tenderness towards the lower animals. It is illustrated in medieval folklore by fancies but not by fads. It is impossible to imagine any fable more fabulous, in the sense of fantastic and frankly incredible, than the story of St. Francis making a business bargain with a very large and dangerous wolf; drawing up a legal document with carefully numbered promises and concessions from the party of the first part and the party of the second part; the wild beast solemnly lodging a legal affidavit by the number of times he nodded his head. And yet there is in that fairy-tale a rustic and realistic sagacity that comes from real relations with animals, and is therefore perhaps called by the picturesque name of horse-sense. It was not written by the modern monomaniac animal-worshipper. It is a pleasant story because the saint is considering the peasants as well as the wolf. St. Francis was not the sort of man to agree with the hypothetical Hindoo who would be slowly devoured by a Bengal tiger, and remain in a state of philosophical absent-mindedness, because tigers are quite as cosmic as Hindoos. The Christian common sense of St. Francis, even in this wild fable, seized on the vital fact; that men must be saved from wolves as well as wolves from hunger, or even more so, and that this could only be done by some sort of definite arrangement. And it does put its finger upon the difficulty; in the absence of communication and therefore of contract between men and beasts. It realises that a moral obligation must be a mutual obligation. St. Francis contemplating the mountain wolf, hits on the same point as Job contemplating the monstrous Leviathan: “Will he make a pact with thee?” That is a sort of solid popular instinct, which was never lost by the really popular saint, in spite of anything which strangers might stare at as his antics or his agonies. Men remembered that he had been a good friend to them as well as to birds and beasts; and the fact is still apparent in the most remote and extravagant rumours of him. It is in this that he differs from some of the rather unbalanced and unnatural humanitarians of modern times. As a matter of fact, St. Francis does not by any means stand alone among medieval or other saints in this protest and protection of animals against men; though he probably does stand alone in his poetical and imaginative power of stamping the memory of it in picturesque images on the popular mind. Some of the greatest medieval priests long before St. Francis, St. Anselm, for instance, were famous for demanding kindness to the brute creation; many of them, St. Hugh of Lincoln, for instance, had an even more eccentric taste in pets; for St. Hugh, instead of preaching to the birds, seems to have allowed a large bird to accompany him everywhere like a curate. But what is notable about this medieval theory of mercy is something ultimately mild and reasonable, however freakish was its expression; a comprehension of the common needs of common people, and a humanitarianism that did not exclude humanity. In that sense, it is the modern age that is the age of fanatics.
This fact of St. Francis becoming a modern fashion, after having been for so long a medieval tradition, might well arouse in his real admirers a fear of his cult becoming merely artistic in the sense of merely artificial. And yet, in spite of one or two incongruous interventions, this has not really taken place. It is perhaps the highest tribute to the truth and sincerity of St. Francis that even now he can keep his simplicity in the face of fashionable admiration; as the Franciscan in the story kept the fashionable crowd at a distance by playing antics on a seesaw. And this remarkable escape from the suffocation of sophistication is nowhere better expressed than in what still remains, even to the eye of the traveller—the naked nobility of his native town.
A traveller at all experienced in the ways of travellers, not to say of trippers, will approach the steep city of Assisi with some feelings of doubt and even of fear. He will know that the modern discovery of the medieval saint may yet be followed by disasters, more subtle than those which superstition has traced in the modern disinterment of the Egyptian king. He will know that there are things to which guide-books are not the best guides; which are seen better by solitary pilgrims than by sociable tourists; and, without any sort of superiority let alone misanthropy, he will have had experience already of places which crowds of visitors have made less worth visiting. He will know that quarrels not untouched by quackeries have insulted the great silence of Glastonbury; he will know that there is some truth in the report that a bustle of sight-seeing and a bawling for baksheesh has spoiled for many the spiritual adventure of Jerusalem. Knowing how many aimless aesthetes, how many irresponsible intellectuals, how many mere sheep of show and fashion follow this track through Italy, he may well fear to find obliterated the ancient simplicity of Assisi. But when he sees it, if I may answer for at least one among many such travellers, he will receive what I can only describe as a cool shock of consolation.
GIOTTO E SAN FRANCESCO
San Francesco d’Assisi è stato per secoli un santo popolare; nella nostra epoca, per la prima volta, ha corso in qualche misura il pericolo di diventare un santo alla moda. Quella particolare distinzione dei salotti, che si dice sia stata una tentazione respinta da molti santi durante la loro vita, e che è certamente un’insidia che assedia per tutta l’esistenza la maggior parte dei predicatori di successo, è giunta infine a questo predicatore popolare seicento anni dopo la sua morte. È naturale che gli artisti si interessino al poeta che fu, in pratica, il fondatore dell’arte medievale e quindi dell’arte moderna. E non è che troppo vero che, ovunque ammettiamo l’artista, è assai difficile escludere l’esteta. Questa specie di lieve trambusto letterario, per quanto spesso sincero come sentimento e persino prezioso come tributo, è l’esatto contrario di quella popolarità solida e tradizionale che san Francesco godette presso innumerevoli generazioni di contadini. C’è qualcosa, nelle tradizioni contadine, e persino nelle leggende contadine, che sa restare vicino alla terra. È il marchio del vero folklore che perfino il racconto manifestamente selvaggio sia eminentemente assennato. Lo vediamo nelle più stravaganti storie dei santi, se le confrontiamo con le stravaganti teorie dei sofisti e dei sentimentali. Si prenda, per esempio, quel bellissimo attributo per cui san Francesco è giustamente amato in tutto il mondo moderno: la sua tenerezza verso gli animali inferiori. Nel folklore medievale è illustrata da fantasie, ma non da fissazioni. È impossibile immaginare una favola più favolosa, nel senso di fantastica e schiettamente incredibile, di quella di san Francesco che conclude un affare con un lupo grandissimo e pericoloso; stilando un documento legale con promesse e concessioni accuratamente numerate da parte del contraente di prima parte e del contraente di seconda parte; e la belva feroce che presta solennemente giuramento con il numero delle volte in cui piega il capo. Eppure in quella fiaba c’è una sagacia rustica e realistica che nasce da rapporti reali con gli animali, ed è perciò forse chiamata con il pittoresco nome di buon senso da cavallo. Non fu scritta dal moderno monomaniaco adoratore delle bestie. È una storia gradevole perché il santo tiene conto dei contadini non meno che del lupo. San Francesco non era il tipo d’uomo da dar ragione all’ipotetico indù che si lascerebbe divorare lentamente da una tigre del Bengala, restando in uno stato di filosofica distrazione, perché le tigri sono altrettanto cosmiche quanto gli indù. Il buon senso cristiano di san Francesco, persino in questa favola selvaggia, colse il fatto vitale: che gli uomini vanno salvati dai lupi non meno di quanto i lupi vadano salvati dalla fame, o addirittura di più, e che ciò poteva farsi soltanto con qualche precisa forma di accordo. E davvero mette il dito sulla difficoltà: nell’assenza di comunicazione, e quindi di contratto, tra gli uomini e le bestie. Comprende che un obbligo morale dev’essere un obbligo reciproco. San Francesco, contemplando il lupo di montagna, coglie il medesimo punto che coglie Giobbe contemplando il mostruoso Leviatano: «Farà egli patto con te?». È una sorta di solido istinto popolare, che il santo autenticamente popolare non perse mai, malgrado tutto ciò che gli estranei potessero fissare come sue bizzarrie o sue agonie. Gli uomini ricordavano che era stato buon amico a loro non meno che agli uccelli e alle bestie; e il fatto è ancora evidente nelle dicerie più remote e stravaganti su di lui. È in questo che egli differisce da certi umanitari piuttosto squilibrati e innaturali dei tempi moderni. In verità, san Francesco non è affatto solo tra i santi medievali e non, in questa protesta e protezione degli animali contro gli uomini; benché probabilmente sia solo nella sua potenza poetica e immaginativa di imprimere il suo ricordo in immagini pittoresche nella mente popolare. Alcuni dei più grandi sacerdoti medievali, molto prima di san Francesco — sant’Anselmo, per esempio — furono celebri per aver reclamato bontà verso la creazione bruta; molti di loro, come sant’Ugo di Lincoln, ebbero un gusto ancor più eccentrico in fatto di animali prediletti; perché sant’Ugo, invece di predicare agli uccelli, pare che si facesse accompagnare ovunque da un grande uccello come da un cappellano. Ma ciò che è notevole in questa teoria medievale della misericordia è qualcosa di ultimamente mite e ragionevole, per quanto bizzarra ne fosse l’espressione: una comprensione dei comuni bisogni della gente comune, e un umanitarismo che non escludeva l’umanità. In tal senso, è l’età moderna a essere l’età dei fanatici.
Questo fatto — che san Francesco stia diventando una moda moderna, dopo essere stato per tanto tempo una tradizione medievale — potrebbe bene destinare nei suoi veri ammiratori il timore che il suo culto si faccia meramente artistico, nel senso di meramente artificioso. Eppure, malgrado un paio d’interventi incongrui, ciò non è realmente accaduto. È forse il più alto tributo alla verità e alla sincerità di san Francesco che ancor oggi egli sappia conservare la propria semplicità di fronte all’ammirazione alla moda; come il francescano della storia teneva a distanza la folla elegante facendo capriole su un’altalena. E questa notevole fuga dal soffocamento della sofisticazione non è espressa in nessun luogo meglio che in ciò che ancora rimane, persino all’occhio del viaggiatore: la nuda nobiltà della sua città natale.
Un viaggiatore anche solo un poco esperto nelle abitudini dei viaggiatori, per non dire dei gitanti, si avvicinerà all’erta città di Assisi con qualche sentimento di dubbio e persino di timore. Saprà che la moderna scoperta del santo medievale potrebbe pur sempre essere seguita da disastri più sottili di quelli che la superstizione ha rintracciato nella moderna esumazione del re egizio. Saprà che vi sono cose alle quali le guide turistiche non sono le guide migliori; cose che si vedono meglio dai pellegrini solitari che dai turisti socievoli; e, senza alcuna specie di superiorità, e tanto meno di misantropia, avrà già fatto esperienza di per sé di luoghi che le folle di visitatori hanno reso meno degni d’essere visitati. Saprà che liti non immuni da ciarlatanerie hanno insultato il grande silenzio di Glastonbury; saprà che c’è qualche verità nella voce secondo cui un trambusto di visite turistiche e uno strepitare di bakshish hanno guastato per molti l’avventura spirituale di Gerusalemme. Sapendo quanti esteti senza scopo, quanti intellettuali irresponsabili, quante pure pecore dello sfarzo e della moda seguano questa pista attraverso l’Italy, potrà bene temere di trovare cancellata l’antica semplicità di Assisi. Ma quando la vedrà — se posso rispondere per almeno uno tra molti di tali viaggiatori — riceverà ciò che posso soltanto descrivere come un fresco scossone di consolazione.
The city is founded upon a rock; the city is a rock; and it is too simple for anybody to spoil. It has proved practically impossible to paint or gild or pad or upholster or even to scratch that rock. In the main lines of it an austerity alone remains in the memory; and even the beauty of the milder landscape is itself austere. There may be, indeed there is, the usual accumulation in corners of the popular trinkets or traditional toys of devotion, which some people are so unfortunately fastidious as to resent; but that is not the sort of peril of which I am thinking, even from the point of view of those who would admit it to be in other ways perilous. It is not a question of any abuses among the ignorant or the innocent who look up to the saint; it is a question of the condescending culture that looks down to him; not a matter of importing idolatry into the institution of a patron saint; but a matter of patronising the patron. And though multitudes in this rather snobbish state of mind must have passed through so established a station of the Italian pilgrimage, they have not in fact left any trail behind them, as they have in so many similar places; the hills have forgotten them and their personalities have passed away with the smell of their petrol. St. Francis is still left alone with his own friars and mostly with his own friends; and especially with that great first friend who was his interpreter to the expanding civilisation that came after him; the friend who could express in images what Francis himself had always felt as imagery, or what we call imagination; the painter who translated the poet—Giotto.
The advance of art criticism is a continual retreat; it would seem in some strange manner destined to march perpetually backwards into older and older periods. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the critics had finally accepted the normality of the Ancient Greeks. By the end of the nineteenth century the critics were already inaugurating the novelty of the Ancient Egyptians. We must all, by this time, be familiar with expressions of admiration for the art of the Caveman, scrawled in rock and red ochre with an unmistakable spirit and even distinction of draughtsmanship; the cult of the prehistoric which has given a new meaning to the cult of the Primitives. It will soon seem perfectly natural to be talking about the modernised and decadent sophistication of the Second Stone Age as compared with the rich but well-balanced civilisation of the First Stone Age. The further we go back to explore, the more we find that is really worth exploring; and the nearer we are to the real primitive man, the further we are from the ape or even the savage. This being true even of the tremendous scope of the whole history of the human tribe, it is not to be wondered at that men have made the same discovery about the high and complex culture of Christendom. The spotlight of artistic interest and concentration has been steadily travelling backwards ever since I was a child. I can remember faintly that in my first years it was still felt as something of a paradox to maintain that the quaintness of Botticelli could be taken as seriously as the solid finish of Guido Reni; that Ruskin was still a revolutionist for preferring the dayspring of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century to the dregs of the Renaissance in the eighteenth. Even as late as that, for most people, Giotto was still not so much a Primitive as a primitive man. He was a sort of savage who had done some service by discovering that it was possible to scratch something resembling a rudimentary human figure on the walls of his cave. For most people all serious art still lay between Raphael and Reynolds. As I grew up, the Ruskinian revolution prevailed, and most men came to realise that Giotto was a great painter; but even those men generally regarded him as the first great painter. But now, in yet more recent times, the artists are yet more like archaeologists, in the sense of going back to what is yet more archaic. The change that has passed over the most recent phase of art criticism can be sufficiently suggested by this one case of Giotto. I referred somewhere, in the Ruskinian manner, to Giotto as the figure who stands at the beginning of Christian art. One of the most creative of modern sculptors, whom many would call a medievalist, wrote to assure me that Giotto stands at the end of Christian art; with something like a broad hint that Giotto brought it to an end.
The spotlight has moved further back, and is now illuminating what even Ruskin and the romantic medievalists would have regarded as a desert of dead and barbaric formalism; the true Dark Ages. Our Progressives are now bound with golden chains to the decline of Byzantium, rather than to the rise of Florence. It is quaint to think how little harm a blundering nickname need do in the long run. All the admirers of Gothic call it Gothic, though it was originally meant to stamp it as barbaric. And all the admirers of Byzantine call it Byzantine; though the very adjective is already in use as a symbol of stiff degradation and decline. The new theories about rhythm and design have done justice to the old pictures which the romantics regarded merely as diagrams or patterns. The change from Cimabue to Giotto is at least not so certainly an unmixed improvement as it appeared to the Victorian medievalists. There is, as it were, a new school of Pre-Raphaelites, who are not only pre-Raphael, but pre-Giotto. The shining figure of the shepherd no longer stands against a background of black and barbarous darkness; but in a sort of double light, in itself involving some of these subtler problems of balance and recurrence; having on his right hand the wide white daybreak of Rome and Assisi and Paris and all the West, and on his left the long and gorgeous golden sunset of the great city of Constantine.
La città è fondata sulla roccia; la città è una roccia; ed è troppo semplice perché qualcuno possa guastarla. Si è dimostrato praticamente impossibile dipingere o dorare o imbottire o tappezzare o persino graffiare quella roccia. Nelle sue linee principali rimane nella memoria soltanto un’austerità di per sé; e persino la bellezza del più mite paesaggio è a sua volta austera. Vi può essere, anzi vi è, il consueto accumulo negli angoli di soprammobili popolari o di tradizionali balocchi devozionali, che certuni sono così malauguratamente schizzinosi da risentirsene; ma non è quella la specie di pericolo cui sto pensando, nemmeno dal punto di vista di chi ammetterebbe che è per altri versi pericoloso. Non è questione di abusi tra gli ignoranti o gli innocenti che levano lo sguardo al santo; è questione della cultura condiscendente che lo guarda dall’alto in basso; non si tratta di importare idolatria nell’istituzione di un santo patrono, ma di trattare con sufficienza il patrono. E benché moltitudini in questo stato d’animo piuttosto snobistico debbano aver attraversato una stazione così consacrata del pellegrinaggio italiano, esse non hanno in realtà lasciato alcuna traccia dietro di sé, come invece hanno fatto in tanti luoghi simili; le colline le hanno dimenticate, e le loro personalità sono svanite con l’odore della loro benzina. San Francesco resta ancora solo con i propri frati e per lo più con i propri amici; e specialmente con quel grande primo amico che fu il suo interprete presso la civiltà in espansione che venne dopo di lui; l’amico che sapeva esprimere in immagini ciò che Francesco stesso aveva sempre sentito come figurazione, ossia ciò che noi chiamiamo immaginazione; il pittore che tradusse il poeta: Giotto.
L’avanzata della critica d’arte è una continua ritirata; parrebbe destinata, in qualche strano modo, a marciare perpetuamente all’indietro verso epoche sempre più antiche. All’inizio dell’Ottocento i critici avevano finalmente accettato la normalità degli antichi Greci. Alla fine dell’Ottocento i critici stavano già inaugurando la novità degli antichi Egizi. Ormai, a questo punto, dobbiamo essere tutti familiari con espressioni di ammirazione per l’arte dell’uomo delle caverne, scarabocchiata sulla roccia e in ocra rossa con uno spirito inconfondibile e persino una distinzione di disegno; il culto del preistorico, che ha dato un nuovo significato al culto dei Primitivi. Presto sembrerà perfettamente naturale parlare della sofisticazione modernizzata e decadente della Seconda Età della Pietra a confronto con la ricca ma ben equilibrata civiltà della Prima Età della Pietra. Più addietro andiamo a esplorare, più troviamo cose realmente degne d’essere esplorate; e più siamo vicini al vero uomo primitivo, più siamo lontani dalla scimmia e persino dal selvaggio. E poiché questo è vero anche per l’immensa portata dell’intera storia della tribù umana, non c’è da meravigliarsi che gli uomini abbiano fatto la medesima scoperta a proposito dell’alta e complessa cultura della cristianità. Il riflettore dell’interesse e della concentrazione artistica ha viaggiato costantemente all’indietro fin da quando io ero bambino. Ricordo vagamente che, nei miei primi anni, era ancora avvertito come un certo paradosso sostenere che la stranezza di Botticelli potesse essere presa sul serio quanto la solida finitezza di Guido Reni; che Ruskin era ancora un rivoluzionario per preferire l’aurora del Rinascimento nel Trecento alle fecce del Rinascimento nel Settecento. Persino a quella data, per la maggior parte della gente, Giotto era ancora non tanto un Primitivo quanto un uomo primitivo. Era una specie di selvaggio che aveva reso un qualche servizio scoprendo che era possibile graffiare qualcosa di simile a una rudimentale figura umana sulle pareti della propria caverna. Per la maggior parte della gente tutta l’arte seria giaceva ancora tra Raffaello e Reynolds. Man mano che crescevo, la rivoluzione ruskiniana prevalse, e la maggior parte degli uomini giunse a comprendere che Giotto era un grande pittore; ma persino costoro lo consideravano in genere come il primo grande pittore. Ora, però, in tempi ancor più recenti, gli artisti somigliano sempre più agli archeologi, nel senso di risalire a ciò che è ancor più arcaico. Il mutamento che è passato sopra la fase più recente della critica d’arte può essere sufficientemente suggerito da questo solo caso di Giotto. Ho accennato in qualche luogo, alla maniera ruskiniana, a Giotto come alla figura che sta all’inizio dell’arte cristiana. Uno dei più creativi scultori moderni, che molti chiamerebbero medievalista, mi scrisse per assicurarmi che Giotto sta alla fine dell’arte cristiana; con qualcosa come una larga insinuazione che Giotto vi mise fine.
Il riflettore si è spostato più indietro, e ora illumina ciò che persino Ruskin e i romantici medievalisti avrebbero considerato un deserto di formalismo morto e barbarico: le vere Età Oscure. I nostri Progressisti sono ormai avvinti da catene d’oro al declino di Bisanzio, più che al sorgere di Firenze. È curioso pensare quanto poco male un maldestro soprannome debba in fondo produrre alla lunga. Tutti gli ammiratori del gotico lo chiamano gotico, benché in origine il termine intendesse bollarlo come barbarico. E tutti gli ammiratori del bizantino lo chiamano bizantino, benché lo stesso aggettivo sia già in uso come simbolo di rigida degradazione e declino. Le nuove teorie sul ritmo e sul disegno hanno reso giustizia alle antiche pitture che i romantici consideravano meri diagrammi o motivi ornamentali. Il passaggio da Cimabue a Giotto non è, almeno, un miglioramento tanto sicuro e senza mescolanze quanto appariva ai medievalisti vittoriani. Vi è, per così dire, una nuova scuola di Preraffaelliti, che non sono soltanto pre-raffaelleschi, ma pre-giotteschi. La figura luminosa del pastore non si staglia più contro uno sfondo di tenebra nera e barbara; ma in una sorta di duplice luce, che di per sé implica alcuni di questi più sottili problemi di equilibrio e di ricorrenza; avendo alla sua destra l’ampia bianca aurora di Roma e di Assisi e di Parigi e di tutto l’Occidente, e alla sua sinistra il lungo e sfarzoso tramonto dorato della grande città di Costantino.
But in truth this double light may make for a better enlightenment, both about Giotto and his master St. Francis. The two artistic movements, coming one after the other, have between them done some justice to two halves of medieval history, and an earlier and a later period of Christendom, both of which had been underrated and misunderstood. There is a sort of mathematical beauty in the harshness of Byzantine art which is only beginning to be understood; but there is none the less another and livelier kind of beauty in the more humanised art of the later Middle Ages; something suggestive of a moment when a dead design comes to life, or a pattern begins to move, or even to dance. Some humorist wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangle”, and a mystical theologian might find in it a profound significance touching the loves of the Trinity. In other words, the old abstract expression of divine beauty was the expression of a truth, but the other truth of its expression in the concrete was none the less true. Now what is true of the early abstract art and the humanistic revolution of Giotto, is equally true of the abstract theology and the humanistic revolution of Francis. Some modern writers on the first Franciscans talk as if Francis was the first to invent the idea of the Love of God and the God of Love; or at least was the first to go back and find it in the Gospels. The truth is that anybody could find it in any of the creeds and doctrinal definitions of any period between the Gospels and the Franciscan movement. But he would find it in the theological dogmas as he would find it in the Byzantine pictures, drawn out in stark and simple lines like a mathematical diagram, asserted with a sort of dark clarity for those who can appreciate the idea of logical content and balance. In the sermons of St. Francis, as in the pictures of Giotto, it is made popular by pantomime. Men are beginning to act it as in a theatre, instead of representing it as in a picture or a pattern. Thus we find that St. Francis was in many ways the actual founder of the medieval miracle play; and there is all this suggestion of a stiff thing coming to life in the tale of his contact with the Bambino, illustrated in one of Giotto’s designs. And thus we find in Giotto himself a quality unique and hardly to be repeated in history. It is a sense, not only of movement, but of the first movement. There is still something in his figures that suggests that they are like the pillars of a church moved by the spiritual earthquake of a divine visitation, but even so moved slowly and with a sort of reluctant grandeur. The figures are still partly architectural while the faces are alive with portraiture. This first moment of motion has much to do with that sense of morning and youth which so many admirers of medievalism have felt, and which I shall continue to feel, with all respect to the medievalist sculptor. Nothing is nearer to the nerve of primal wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, than that strange saying of the blind man in the Gospels, that when he was half awakened to sight, he saw “men as trees walking.” There is something about the figures of Giotto that suggests men as trees walking. The Byzantine School will not permit me to say that before his eyes were thus opened, the artist had been wholly blind. But I will still maintain that there was something like a miracle, in the transition from treating trees as tracery and men as trees, to the realisation of the new shock of liberation; and how, at the word of God, they could arise and walk.
And here again we strike the parallel between the artist and the saint. The followers of St. Francis were, above all things, men who could walk. Many of them even walked with that sort of dazed unfamiliarity and doubtful balance, being suddenly robbed by a whirlwind of all the props of property. But they walked, because a new spirit of walking, and even of wandering, had entered into the static scheme of medieval Christianity; just as a new spirit of gesture and drama had entered into the static scheme of decorative art. The difference between the Friars and the Monks was, after all, that the Friars now walked like men where the Monks had once stood like statues. I mean nothing but admiration for the Benedictine monks, as for the Byzantine mosaics: or, for that matter, the grand and almost grim rationality of the great abstract dogmas. But there had come upon these flat and spacious things, carved in stone or ordered like statues, a new depth or dimension; a new quality of drama and motion. The popular propaganda of St. Francis, throwing thousands of wandering friars out into roads of the world, was the beginning of what we call the modern spirit; the spirit of romance and experiment and earthly adventure. For once a modern phrase which is much misused, may be rightly used. The Benedictines were, in the exact sense, an Order; as the plan of a cathedral is an Order. The Franciscans were, in the exact sense, a movement. Historically, perhaps, the most interesting of the great pictures by Giotto which are displayed in the Upper Church of Assisi, is that which commemorates the famous dream of the great Pope Innocent the Third; in which he saw the strange beggar, from whom he had almost turned away in the street, upholding the whole toppling load of St. John Lateran, and indeed, in a larger symbolism, the whole load of St. Peter and the Church founded on a rock. More than one historian has suggested that, humanly speaking, it was St. Francis who prevented all Christendom from coming to an end under the double destructive drive and drag of Islam without and the pessimist heresies within. This particular picture is also worth noting, as a perfect example of that solidity which marked the simplicity of the medieval mind. Modern writers have referred often enough to medieval dreams and dark clouds and dim mystical fancies. But in fact the medievals never dealt in these things, even where they would have been justified in dealing in them. There is scarcely any modern of any school, who could deliberately draw a picture of a vision in the watches of the night, especially a vision so very visionary, so transcendental and so tremendously symbolic, as that of an unknown saint upholding a universal church, without bringing into the picture some shadow of unreality, or remoteness, of a lurid halo of the preternatural; at least of mystery and the tints of twilight. But the medieval dream is more solid than the modern reality. The medieval artist has dealt with it with a directness which belongs to the vigorous realism of innocence and of childhood; the sort of actuality which has been wholly untouched by the many sorts of scepticism which masquerade as mysticism. The dream is full of something very extraordinary, something which did indeed, for those who can understand it, shine on the evil and the good throughout the epoch that we call the Dark Ages: broad daylight.
Ma in verità questa duplice luce può giovare a un migliore rischiaramento, tanto su Giotto quanto sul suo maestro san Francesco. I due movimenti artistici, venuti l’uno dopo l’altro, hanno tra loro reso una certa giustizia a due metà della storia medievale, a un periodo anteriore e a uno posteriore della cristianità, entrambi sottovalutati e fraintesi. Vi è una sorta di bellezza matematica nell’asprezza dell’arte bizantina, che solo ora comincia a essere compresa; ma non per questo manca un altro e più vivace genere di bellezza nell’arte più umanizzata del basso Medioevo; qualcosa che suggerisce l’attimo in cui un disegno morto prende vita, o un motivo comincia a muoversi, o persino a danzare. Un umorista scrisse un’opera intitolata «Gli amori del Triangolo», e un teologo mistico potrebbe trovarvi un profondo significato che tocca gli amori della Trinità. In altre parole, l’antica espressione astratta della bellezza divina era l’espressione di una verità, ma l’altra verità della sua espressione nel concreto non era per questo meno vera. Ora, ciò che è vero della prima arte astratta e della rivoluzione umanistica di Giotto, è ugualmente vero della teologia astratta e della rivoluzione umanistica di Francesco. Certi scrittori moderni sui primi francescani parlano come se Francesco fosse stato il primo a inventare l’idea dell’amore di Dio e del Dio d’amore; o almeno il primo a risalire indietro e a ritrovarla nei Vangeli. La verità è che chiunque avrebbe potuto trovarla in uno qualunque dei credi e delle definizioni dottrinali di qualsiasi periodo tra i Vangeli e il movimento francescano. Ma l’avrebbe trovata nei dogmi teologici come l’avrebbe trovata nelle pitture bizantine, tracciata in linee nude e semplici come un diagramma matematico, asserita con una sorta di oscura chiarezza per coloro che sanno apprezzare l’idea di contenuto logico e di equilibrio. Nei sermoni di san Francesco, come nelle pitture di Giotto, essa viene resa popolare tramite la pantomima. Gli uomini cominciano a recitarla come in un teatro, invece di rappresentarla come in un quadro o in un motivo ornamentale. Così scopriamo che san Francesco fu per molti versi l’effettivo fondatore della sacra rappresentazione medievale; e c’è tutta questa suggestione di una cosa rigida che prende vita nel racconto del suo contatto con il Bambino, illustrato in uno dei disegni di Giotto. E così troviamo in Giotto stesso una qualità unica e difficilmente ripetibile nella storia. È un senso non soltanto del movimento, ma del primo movimento. C’è ancora qualcosa, nelle sue figure, che suggerisce come esse siano simili alle colonne di una chiesa smosse dal terremoto spirituale di una visitazione divina, ma smosse tuttavia lentamente e con una sorta di riluttante grandiosità. Le figure sono ancora in parte architettoniche, mentre i volti sono vivi di ritrattistica. Questo primo attimo di moto ha molto a che vedere con quel senso di mattino e di gioventù che tanti ammiratori del medievalismo hanno provato, e che io continuerò a provare, con tutto il rispetto per lo scultore medievalista. Nulla è più prossimo al nervo dello stupore primevo, che è l’anima di tutte le arti, di quello strano detto del cieco nei Vangeli, che quando fu risvegliato a metà alla vista, vide «gli uomini come alberi che camminano». C’è qualcosa, nelle figure di Giotto, che suggerisce uomini come alberi che camminano. La Scuola Bizantina non mi permetterà di dire che, prima che i suoi occhi fossero così aperti, l’artista fosse stato del tutto cieco. Ma continuerò a sostenere che ci fu qualcosa di simile a un miracolo, nel passaggio dal trattare gli alberi come trafori e gli uomini come alberi, alla realizzazione del nuovo scossone di liberazione; e a come, alla parola di Dio, essi potessero levarsi e camminare.
E qui di nuovo cogliamo il parallelo tra l’artista e il santo. I seguaci di san Francesco erano, sopra ogni cosa, uomini capaci di camminare. Molti di loro camminavano persino con quella specie di attonita estraneità e di dubbio equilibrio, essendo stati d’un tratto derubati da un turbine di tutti i puntelli della proprietà. Ma camminavano, perché un nuovo spirito del camminare, e persino del vagare, era entrato nello schema statico della cristianità medievale; proprio come un nuovo spirito di gesto e di dramma era entrato nello schema statico dell’arte decorativa. La differenza tra i Frati e i Monaci era, in fondo, che i Frati ora camminavano come uomini là dove i Monaci un tempo erano stati fermi come statue. Non intendo se non ammirazione per i monaci benedettini, come per i mosaici bizantini: o, se è per questo, per la grande e quasi arcigna razionalità dei grandi dogmi astratti. Ma su queste cose piatte e spaziose, scolpite nella pietra o ordinate come statue, era venuta una nuova profondità o dimensione; una nuova qualità di dramma e di moto. La propaganda popolare di san Francesco, gettando migliaia di frati erranti sulle strade del mondo, fu l’inizio di ciò che chiamiamo lo spirito moderno; lo spirito di avventura romanzesca e di esperimento e di avventura terrena. Per una volta una moderna espressione assai abusata può essere usata a ragione. I Benedettini furono, nel senso esatto, un Ordine; come il piano di una cattedrale è un ordine. I Francescani furono, nel senso esatto, un movimento. Storicamente, forse, il più interessante dei grandi dipinti di Giotto esposti nella Chiesa Superiore di Assisi è quello che commemora il celebre sogno del grande papa Innocenzo III; in cui egli vide lo strano mendicante, da cui per poco non si era ritratto per la strada, che sosteneva l’intero carico vacillante di San Giovanni in Laterano e, in un più vasto simbolismo, l’intero carico di San Pietro e della Chiesa fondata su una roccia. Più di uno storico ha suggerito che, umanamente parlando, fu san Francesco a impedire che tutta la cristianità andasse in rovina sotto la duplice spinta distruttiva e il trascinamento dell’Islam da fuori e delle eresie pessimiste da dentro. Questo particolare quadro è anche degno di nota come perfetto esempio di quella solidità che contraddistingueva la semplicità della mente medievale. Gli scrittori moderni hanno accennato abbastanza spesso ai sogni medievali, alle nubi oscure e alle fosche fantasie mistiche. Ma di fatto i medievali non trattarono mai queste cose, persino là dove sarebbe stato giustificato trattarle. Non c’è quasi alcun moderno, di nessuna scuola, che potrebbe deliberatamente disegnare l’immagine di una visione nelle veglie della notte — specialmente una visione tanto visionaria, tanto trascendentale e tanto tremendamente simbolica come quella di un santo ignoto che sostiene una chiesa universale — senza portare nel quadro qualche ombra d’irrealtà o di lontananza, qualche livido alone del preternaturale; almeno del mistero e delle tinte del crepuscolo. Ma il sogno medievale è più solido della realtà moderna. L’artista medievale lo ha trattato con una schiettezza che appartiene al vigoroso realismo dell’innocenza e dell’infanzia; quella specie di attualità che è rimasta del tutto intatta dalle molte forme di scetticismo che si mascherano da misticismo. Il sogno è colmo di qualcosa di straordinario, qualcosa che davvero, per coloro che sanno comprenderlo, brillò sui malvagi e sui buoni per tutta l’epoca che chiamiamo le Età Oscure: pieno giorno.
In another sense, however, the spirit illuminating these great medieval designs is not so much generally the spirit of daylight as in a rather curious and peculiar sense, the spirit of daybreak. Of that highly medieval design it is true to say something of what Keats said of the highly classical design of his Grecian Urn. It is a sort of immortal moment of morning, and that which is a mere transition in time fixed as an absolute for eternity. We are so accustomed, in modern times, to think in terms of what we call progress, that we seldom admit, except in a poetical parenthesis, that there is such a thing as a perfect moment which is better than what comes after, as well as better than what went before. Yet it might well be maintained that art in all its history had no better moment, either before or after, than this in which all that was good in the old framework and formalism still remained with the upstanding strength of a great building, but in which there had already entered that rush of life and growth, which had turned it into something like a forest, without having as yet turned it into anything like a jungle. The naturalistic spirit of the nineteenth century, when it first began to understand the genius of Giotto or St. Francis, as interpreted by the talent of Ruskin or of Renan, was bound to fasten especially on the fanciful and charming episode of the Sermon to the Birds. For that generation was less concerned about the preservation of churches and more about the preservation of birds, even if it were in the equivocal sense of the preservation of game. It would be easy to illustrate the whole development, we might even say, the whole ascent and descent, under the emblem or example of the bird. The birds of the primal and symbolic epoch were simplified and somewhat terrible: as in the Eagle of the Apocalypse or the Dove of the Holy Ghost. All other birds in the Byzantine scheme would have been as abstract and typical as the birds of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. The birds of the later realistic epoch, when the painters of the nineteenth century had brought to the last perfection, or the last satiety, the studies of optics or of physics begun in the sixteenth, might well have been a most detailed and even bewildering display of ornithology. But the birds to whom St. Francis preached, in the vision of the thirteenth-century art, were already birds that could fly and sing, but not yet birds that could be shot or stuffed; they had ceased to be merely heraldic without becoming merely scientific. And as, in all studies of St. Francis, we always return to that great comparison which he at once denied with all his humility and desired with all his heart, we may say that they were not wholly unlike those strange birds in the legend, which the Holy Child pinched into shape out of scraps of clay, and then started into life and swiftness with a clap of His little hands.
In un altro senso, tuttavia, lo spirito che illumina questi grandi disegni medievali non è tanto, in generale, lo spirito del pieno giorno, quanto — in un senso piuttosto curioso e peculiare — lo spirito dell’alba. Di quel disegno altamente medievale è giusto dire qualcosa di ciò che Keats disse dell’altamente classico disegno della sua Urna Greca. È una sorta di immortale attimo di mattino, e ciò che è una mera transizione nel tempo vi è fissato come un assoluto per l’eternità. Siamo così abituati, nei tempi moderni, a pensare in termini di ciò che chiamiamo progresso, che di rado ammettiamo, se non in una parentesi poetica, che esista una cosa come un attimo perfetto migliore di ciò che viene dopo, oltre che migliore di ciò che venne prima. Eppure si potrebbe ben sostenere che l’arte, in tutta la sua storia, non ebbe momento migliore, né prima né dopo, di questo in cui tutto ciò che era buono nell’antica intelaiatura e nel formalismo ancora rimaneva con la forza eretta di un grande edificio, ma in cui era già entrato quell’impeto di vita e di crescita che l’aveva mutato in qualcosa di simile a una foresta, senza ancora averlo mutato in qualcosa di simile a una giungla. Lo spirito naturalistico dell’Ottocento, quando cominciò per la prima volta a comprendere il genio di Giotto o di san Francesco, così come interpretato dal talento di Ruskin o di Renan, era destinato ad appuntarsi specialmente sul fantasioso e delizioso episodio della Predica agli Uccelli. Poiché quella generazione era meno preoccupata della conservazione delle chiese e più della conservazione degli uccelli, anche se fosse stato nell’equivoco senso della conservazione della selvaggina. Sarebbe facile illustrare l’intero sviluppo, potremmo persino dire l’intera ascesa e discesa, sotto l’emblema o l’esempio dell’uccello. Gli uccelli dell’epoca primeva e simbolica erano semplificati e alquanto terribili: come nell’Aquila dell’Apocalisse o nella Colomba dello Spirito Santo. Tutti gli altri uccelli, nello schema bizantino, sarebbero stati astratti e tipici quanto gli uccelli di un geroglifico egizio. Gli uccelli della successiva epoca realistica, quando i pittori dell’Ottocento avevano portato all’ultima perfezione, o all’ultima sazietà, gli studi di ottica o di fisica cominciati nel Cinquecento, avrebbero ben potuto essere una dettagliatissima e persino sconcertante esposizione di ornitologia. Ma gli uccelli cui san Francesco predicò, nella visione dell’arte del Duecento, erano già uccelli capaci di volare e cantare, ma non ancora uccelli che si potessero abbattere a fucilate o impagliare; avevano cessato di essere meramente araldici senza diventare meramente scientifici. E poiché, in tutti gli studi su san Francesco, torniamo sempre a quel grande paragone che egli a un tempo negò con tutta la sua umiltà e desiderò con tutto il cuore, possiamo dire che essi non erano del tutto dissimili da quegli strani uccelli della leggenda che il Santo Bambino plasmò con briciole d’argilla, e poi avviò alla vita e alla rapidità con un battito delle sue piccole mani.
THE NEW GROOVE
The Poet Tennyson, like a true Victorian, must have written a good many of his poems in the train; travelling by railroad being the chief invention and institution of his age. Indeed he confesses to have written the poem of Lady Godiva while waiting for the train; and to judge by the careful construction of the blank verse the train must have been very late. But there are other Tennysonian lines which Tennyson would seem to have written while he was asleep in the train. They have that peculiar mixture of jumble and jingle familiar to those who go to sleep in trains and only feel the metallic rhythm of the wheels mingling with the most shapeless and senseless dreams. It was at some such moment of profound slumber that Lord Tennyson composed the more progressive and prophetic portions of Locksley Hall; and this is clearly proved by the convincing, nay, damning, fact that one of the lines does really and truly run:
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Psychologists will be interested in the curious displacement of words and disorder of ideas, which is characteristic of sentences invented in a dream. To the ordinary waking intelligence the words would appear to have no meaning. Grooves do not change; they do not necessarily ring; they do not even ring the changes. But, just as a sleeper in a railway-carriage will murmur, in the shock of awakening, some sentence betraying a secret he would probably have concealed if awake; as that he is travelling first-class with a third-class ticket, or that the corpse of a creditor is concealed under the seat— so Tennyson, in this very extraordinary line of verse, did really betray the secret, and even the crime, of his own intellectual world and most of the world that has come after it.
For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change. And it is, as I say, a revealing fact that even when the modern poet wishes to describe change, even when he wishes to glorify change, he does still instinctively describe it as a groove. This is a mark that has been left on very much of the modern world, ever since the beginning of the mechanical and industrial epoch. But it had its first and clearest form in this fixed conception of travelling by rail. It may be specially noted that we speak of the modern mind being in a groove rather than in a rut. A rut was a term commonly used of a cart-track; in the simple times when we did not put the cart before the horse. When a living thing went before us there was something of doubt or adventure or hesitation in the tracks it made for itself, even if they became grooves for others. There were strange curves in his course who hitched his wagon even to a horse, and who had not yet given up horses for horsepower. There were sometimes very wild and fantastic tracks in his, who hitched his wagon to a star. But, apart from all such figures or fancies, the essential peculiarity of the groove is that there can be nothing new about it except that it may take us to new places, or possibly take us past new places, at an entirely new rate of speed. That is the essential of what I mean by the modern groovings; that its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards.
Let us take, for the sake of clarity, this familiar case of the railway-train. A history of the locomotive steam-engine has often been presented in all its stages of improvement; the evolution of the modern train from the first clumsy models of Puffing Billy. But the engine did not produce anything but faster and faster engines; and the vital point is that nobody ever expected that it would. Nobody, even in a flight of fancy, wondered whether it would develop in any other direction, except the direction of its own groove. For instance, nobody ever suggested that it might develop its own type of architecture, so that the building of cars or carriages should be like the building of temples or town-halls. Yet there might perfectly well have been four or five schools of architecture for the designing of trains, as there are for the designing of temples. It would be a pleasing fancy if the architectural style of the train varied according to the country it was crossing or visiting. The Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York is a noble and serious piece of architecture; and it is really a sort of salute to the great city of Philadelphia towards which its gates are set. It might quite well have fallen out that what was done for the station could be done for the steam-engine; and the very design and colour of the vehicle vary according to whether it was going to the old French cities or the Red Indian plains; to the snows of Alaska or the orange-groves of Florida. Indeed I think there would have been much poetic symbolism in a hundred forms, probably guarded by rituals and dedicated to gods or patron saints, if it had so happened that the steam-engine was discovered by ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, and not by the Philistines of the Victorian time. But the point is here that nobody ever thought of such things; and certainly nobody thought of testing the progress of the train by such tests. There was only one test of the train and that was the test of the groove; of the smoothness of the groove; of the straightness of the groove; of the swiftness with which it travelled along the groove. There was something, in the tone of the whole thing, that prevented even mere fancy from breaking away in any other direction; or wondering, even vainly, if it could ever carry a castle like an elephant or a figurehead like a ship.
IL NUOVO BINARIO
Il poeta Tennyson, da buon vittoriano, dovette scrivere buona parte delle sue poesie in treno; giacché viaggiare in ferrovia era l’invenzione e l’istituzione capitale della sua epoca. Anzi, confessa d’aver composto la poesia di Lady Godiva mentre attendeva il treno; e, a giudicare dalla cura con cui è costruito il verso sciolto, il treno doveva essere in grandissimo ritardo. Ma vi sono altri versi tennysoniani che Tennyson sembra aver scritto mentre dormiva in treno. Hanno quella singolare mescolanza di confusione e tintinnìo familiare a chi va a dormire in treno e non avverte se non il ritmo metallico delle ruote che si fonde con i più informi e insensati sogni. Fu in un simile momento di sonno profondo che Lord Tennyson compose le parti più progressive e profetiche di Locksley Hall; e ciò è chiaramente provato dal fatto convincente, anzi schiacciante, che uno dei versi recita davvero, letteralmente:
Che il gran mondo per sempre ruoti giù pei binari sonanti del mutamento.
Gli psicologi troveranno interessante il curioso spostamento delle parole e il disordine delle idee che caratterizzano le frasi coniate in un sogno. All’intelligenza comune e desta le parole parrebbero prive di senso. I binari non mutano; non necessariamente risuonano; non fanno neppure sonare le campane a distesa. Ma, come chi dorme in un vagone ferroviario mormora, nell’urto del risveglio, qualche frase che tradisce un segreto che da sveglio avrebbe probabilmente celato; per esempio che viaggia in prima classe con un biglietto di terza, o che il cadavere di un creditore è nascosto sotto il sedile— così Tennyson, in questo straordinarissimo verso, tradì davvero il segreto, e persino il delitto, del proprio mondo intellettuale e di gran parte del mondo che è venuto dopo di lui.
Poiché ciò che affligge quasi tutto quel che si fa chiamare mente moderna sono semplicemente i binari; e la nostra abitudine ad accontentarci dei binari, perché ci si dice che sono binari del mutamento. Ed è, come dico, un fatto rivelatore che perfino quando il poeta moderno vuole descrivere il mutamento, perfino quando vuole glorificare il mutamento, lo descriva pur sempre d’istinto come un binario. È un marchio impresso su gran parte del mondo moderno, fin dagli albori dell’epoca meccanica e industriale. Ma ebbe la sua prima e più netta forma in questa concezione fissa del viaggiare in ferrovia. Si noti in particolare che diciamo che la mente moderna è incanalata in un binario piuttosto che in un solco. Il solco era un termine usato comunemente per la traccia d’un carro; ai tempi semplici in cui non mettevamo il carro davanti al cavallo. Quando davanti a noi andava una cosa vivente, c’era qualcosa di incertezza, d’avventura o d’esitazione nelle tracce che essa lasciava, anche se poi diventavano binari per altri. V’erano strane curve nel cammino di chi aggiogava il proprio carro anche a un cavallo, e non aveva ancora barattato i cavalli per la cavalleria a vapore. V’erano talora tracce assai selvagge e fantastiche in quello di chi aggiogava il proprio carro a una stella. Ma, a prescindere da tali figure o fantasie, la peculiarità essenziale del binario è che non vi può esser nulla di nuovo in esso, salvo che ci porti in luoghi nuovi, o magari ci faccia oltrepassare luoghi nuovi, a una velocità del tutto nuova. È questo l’essenziale di ciò che intendo per incanalamento moderno; che la sua unica forma di progresso è andare sempre più veloci lungo una sola linea in una sola direzione. Non ha la curiosità di fermarsi, né il coraggio avventuroso di andare all’indietro.
Prendiamo, per chiarezza, questo caso familiare del treno ferroviario. La storia della locomotiva a vapore è stata spesso presentata in tutte le sue fasi di perfezionamento; l’evoluzione del treno moderno dai primi rozzi modelli del Puffing Billy. Ma la macchina non produsse altro che macchine sempre più veloci; e il punto essenziale è che nessuno si aspettò mai che facesse altro. Nessuno, nemmeno in un volo di fantasia, si domandò se si sarebbe sviluppata in qualche altra direzione, all’infuori della direzione del proprio binario. Per esempio, nessuno suggerì mai che potesse sviluppare un proprio tipo di architettura, così che la costruzione delle carrozze fosse come la costruzione dei templi o dei municipi. Eppure ci sarebbero potute benissimo essere quattro o cinque scuole d’architettura per il disegno dei treni, come ve ne sono per il disegno dei templi. Sarebbe una piacevole fantasia se lo stile architettonico del treno variasse secondo il paese che attraversa o visita. La Pennsylvania Railway Station a New York è un’opera d’architettura nobile e seria; ed è davvero una sorta di saluto alla grande città di Filadelfia, verso la quale sono rivolte le sue porte. Sarebbe potuto benissimo accadere che ciò che fu fatto per la stazione si facesse per la locomotiva; e che il disegno stesso e il colore del veicolo variassero a seconda che esso andasse verso le vecchie città francesi o le pianure dei Pellirosse; verso le nevi dell’Alaska o gli aranceti della Florida. Anzi, credo che vi sarebbe stato molto simbolismo poetico in un centinaio di forme, probabilmente custodite da riti e dedicate a dèi o a santi patroni, se fosse accaduto che la locomotiva a vapore fosse stata scoperta dagli antichi Greci o dai cristiani medievali, e non dai Filistei del tempo vittoriano. Ma il punto è questo: che nessuno pensò mai a simili cose; e certamente nessuno pensò di saggiare il progresso del treno con simili prove. V’era una sola prova per il treno, ed era la prova del binario; della levigatezza del binario; della rettitudine del binario; della rapidità con cui esso correva lungo il binario. V’era qualcosa, nel tono dell’intera faccenda, che impediva perfino alla mera fantasia di svincolarsi in qualsiasi altra direzione; o di chiedersi, sia pure invano, se non avrebbe mai potuto portare un castello come un elefante o una polena come una nave.
Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that. what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world. It is in the most exact sense of the term limited. It is all in one dimension. It is all in one direction. It is limited by its progress. It is limited by its speed.
I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop. If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations. For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance. Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from. Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense. Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all. They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time. What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as “the ringing groove of change”. Take, in this matter of current phrases, the example of the controversy about advanced and futuristic art. I do not mean to consider the art but to consider the controversy; as illustrating what has been said about the advisability of stopping and the stupidity of the non-stop train.
Now although, of course, the actual masses are quite unconverted to Picasso or Epstein, yet the terms of controversy, the only tags of argument known to the newspapers, the only familiar and almost popular sophistries outside mere popular abuse, are on the side of the new schools. I mean that modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change. Whichever side may be really right in the question of art (which obviously depends largely on the particular artists), the whole modern world is verbally prepared to regard the new artist as right and the old artist as wrong. It is prepared to do so by the whole progressive philosophy; which is often rather a phraseology than a philosophy. The language which comes most readily to everyone’s mind is the language of innovation; but it is a language that is rather exercised than examined. For instance, it is probable that more people are even now acquainted with the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats than with the poems of Miss Edith Sitwell. But many, many more people understand what Miss Sitwell means, when she simply says that she is criticised in her day as Keats was criticised in his day, than could possibly understand what Mr. Yeats means, when he says that nothing quite new can be used in poetry; or that innocence is only born out of ceremony and custom. For the former argument is a familiar argument of all modern progressives and reformers; the latter sayings are very profound sayings of a man who really thinks for himself. I agree that in many other things, and especially in the best examples of her poetry, Miss Sitwell also can think for herself. I only say that this particular argument (“John the Baptist was laughed at and I am laughed at”; “Galileo was disbelieved and I am disbelieved”)—this particular argument is part of the regular recognised bag of tricks of reformers and revolutionists; it is a part of the very old apparatus of the New Movement. Now if we apply this, for instance, to the quarrels about painting or sculpture we shall find the same situation: that, whichever side is right, the whole apparatus of modern talk favours the idea that the new thing is always right. There are a definite selection of phrases used, but not often examined. For instance, should any Philistine faintly protest against Helen of Troy being sculptured with a head of the exact shape of the Great Pyramid, or Titania with a figure following the grand simple lines of the hippopotamus at the zoo, or even perhaps his own favourite daughter presenting herself to the public in the appealing and even touching condition of having her nose and eyelids cut off— whenever such a criticism is heard, whether it be right or wrong, it will be answered with the precision of clockwork, by a phrase to the effect that some people want art to be “pretty-pretty”. Now the first act of any independent mind will be to criticise this criticism; and especially to feel a curiosity about the curious form of it. Why does everybody say, “pretty-pretty”? Why not say that some people do not like what is “ugly-ugly”, or possibly what is “beastly-beastly”? What is the meaning of this weird repetition, like a recurring decimal? If you have the sort of independent curiosity that stops at wayside stations, if (in short) you are not merely in a hurry to get to the fashionable terminus, you may well pause upon a phrase like that, not without profit. You will perceive that the phrase is, in fact, a rather pathetic attempt to reproduce the wondering exclamation of a child. And that would be alone enough to destroy the argument. For a child has a very sound sense of wonder at what is really wonderful; and by no means merely a vulgar and varnished taste in what is conventionally beautiful. The thing that a genuine child might call “pretty-pretty” is not the soapy portrait of a débutante or an upholstered group of a royal family; it is much more likely to be a flash of red fire or the strong colours of a great garden flower or something that really is elemental and essential; something in its way quite as “stark” (as our dear friends would say) as the Great Pyramid or the great pachyderm. Children are not snobs in art any more than in morals. And if they often have also a pleasure in things that are really “pretty”, in the sense of a graceful girl by Greuze or a cloud of pink blossom in spring, it is simply because there is a perfectly legitimate place in art for what is pretty; and it is not in the least disposed of by jabbering the same word twice over and calling it “pretty-pretty”. Anyhow, the more supercilious moderns make a bad blunder in imputing childishness in defence of some things that could only be defended as being in the higher sense childish. It was Cezanne himself who said, “I am trying to recover the direct vision of a child.”
Ora, a dispetto delle più sfrenate pretese d’indipendenza, la vita intellettuale d’oggi mi appare tuttora simboleggiata soprattutto dal treno, dai binari, dal solco tracciato. V’è quanto si vuole di trambusto e vivacità intorno a certe fisse mode o direzioni del pensiero; proprio come v’è quanta si vuole di rapidità lungo le rotaie fisse della ferrovia. Ma se cominciamo a pensare di uscire davvero dai binari, scopriremo che ciò che vale per il treno vale ugualmente per la verità. Scopriremo che è in realtà più difficile uscire dal binario quando il treno va veloce che quando il treno va piano. Scopriremo che la rapidità è rigidità; che il fatto stesso che un movimento sociale o politico o artistico vada sempre più veloce significa che sempre meno gente ha il coraggio di muoversi contro di esso. E alla fine forse nessuno spiccherà un balzo verso la vera libertà intellettuale, proprio come nessuno salta giù da un treno che corre a ottanta miglia all’ora. Questo mi sembra il primo carattere di ciò che chiamiamo pensiero progressivo nel mondo moderno. Esso è, nel senso più esatto del termine, limitato. È tutto in una sola dimensione. È tutto in una sola direzione. È limitato dal proprio progresso. È limitato dalla propria velocità.
Ho detto che non ha la curiosità di fermarsi. Se gli abitanti del treno fossero veri viaggiatori, che esplorano un paese ignoto per fare scoperte, si fermerebbero sempre alle piccole stazioni lungo la via. Per esempio, si fermerebbero sempre a considerare la curiosa natura dei loro stessi termini convenzionali; cosa che non fanno mai, in nessun caso. I loro slogan sono considerati unicamente come congegni o strumenti per portarli dove stanno andando; non gettano mai indietro un pensiero su donde venga lo slogan. Eppure è esattamente ciò che farebbero se pensassero davvero, in un senso pieno e a tutto tondo. Naturalmente si comprenderà, quanto a queste mode intellettuali, che grandi masse, probabilmente la massa dell’umanità, non viaggiano affatto sul treno. Restano nei loro villaggi e sono assai più felici e migliori; ma non sono considerate le guide intellettuali del tempo. Ciò di cui mi lagno è che le guide intellettuali possono soltanto guidare lungo un unico stretto binario; altrimenti detto «il sonante binario del mutamento». Prendiamo, in questa faccenda delle frasi correnti, l’esempio della controversia sull’arte avanzata e futurista. Non intendo considerare l’arte, ma considerare la controversia; come illustrazione di quanto s’è detto sull’opportunità di fermarsi e sulla stoltezza del treno che non si ferma mai.
Ora, benché, s’intende, le masse reali non siano affatto convertite a Picasso o a Epstein, tuttavia i termini della controversia, gli unici cavilli d’argomentazione noti ai giornali, gli unici sofismi familiari e quasi popolari al di là del semplice insulto popolare, stanno dalla parte delle nuove scuole. Voglio dire che gli uomini moderni non hanno familiarità con gli argomenti razionali in favore della tradizione; ma hanno familiarità, e una familiarità quasi stucchevole, con gli argomenti razionali in favore del mutamento. Da qualunque parte stia davvero la ragione nella questione dell’arte (che ovviamente dipende in gran parte dai singoli artisti), tutto il mondo moderno è verbalmente disposto a considerare il nuovo artista nel giusto e il vecchio artista nel torto. Vi è disposto da tutta la filosofia progressiva; che spesso è più una fraseologia che una filosofia. Il linguaggio che si affaccia più prontamente alla mente di ognuno è il linguaggio dell’innovazione; ma è un linguaggio che si esercita più di quanto si esamini. Per esempio, è probabile che perfino ora più persone conoscano le poesie del signor W. B. Yeats che le poesie della signorina Edith Sitwell. Ma moltissime più persone capiscono ciò che intende la signorina Sitwell quando dice semplicemente d’essere criticata ai suoi giorni come Keats fu criticato ai suoi, di quante potrebbero mai capire ciò che intende il signor Yeats quando dice che nulla di veramente nuovo può essere usato in poesia; o che l’innocenza nasce soltanto dalla cerimonia e dall’usanza. Poiché il primo argomento è un argomento familiare a tutti i moderni progressisti e riformatori; le seconde affermazioni sono detti assai profondi di un uomo che pensa davvero con la propria testa. Convengo che in molte altre cose, e specialmente nei migliori esempi della sua poesia, anche la signorina Sitwell sa pensare con la propria testa. Dico soltanto che questo particolare argomento («Giovanni Battista fu deriso, e io sono derisa»; «Galileo non fu creduto, e io non sono creduta»)—questo particolare argomento fa parte del regolare e riconosciuto repertorio di trucchi dei riformatori e dei rivoluzionari; è parte del vecchissimo armamentario del Nuovo Movimento. Ora, se applichiamo tutto ciò, per esempio, alle dispute intorno alla pittura o alla scultura, troveremo la stessa situazione: che, da qualunque parte stia la ragione, tutto l’apparato del discorso moderno favorisce l’idea che la cosa nuova abbia sempre ragione. Vi è una precisa selezione di frasi usate, ma di rado esaminate. Per esempio, se qualche Filisteo osasse debolmente protestare contro Helen di Troia scolpita con una testa della forma esatta della Grande Piramide, o Titania con una figura che segue le grandi linee semplici dell’ippopotamo allo zoo, o magari contro la propria figlia prediletta che si presenta al pubblico nella condizione appellante e perfino toccante d’avere il naso e le palpebre tagliati via— ogni volta che si ode una simile critica, che sia giusta o sbagliata, le si risponderà con la precisione di un orologio, con una frase del tenore che certa gente vuole che l’arte sia «graziosa-graziosa». Ora il primo atto di ogni mente indipendente sarà criticare questa critica; e specialmente provare curiosità per la sua curiosa forma. Perché tutti dicono «graziosa-graziosa»? Perché non dire che certa gente non ama ciò che è «brutto-brutto», o magari ciò che è «bestiale-bestiale»? Qual è il senso di questa bizzarra ripetizione, come un decimale periodico? Se avete quella sorta di curiosità indipendente che si ferma alle stazioncine lungo la via, se (insomma) non avete fretta di arrivare al capolinea alla moda, potete ben soffermarvi su una frase simile, non senza profitto. Vi accorgerete che la frase è, in realtà, un tentativo piuttosto patetico di riprodurre l’esclamazione meravigliata di un bambino. E ciò basterebbe da solo a distruggere l’argomento. Poiché un bambino ha un ben saldo senso di meraviglia per ciò che è davvero meraviglioso; e per nulla un gusto volgare e verniciato per ciò che è convenzionalmente bello. La cosa che un vero bambino potrebbe chiamare «graziosa-graziosa» non è il ritratto sdolcinato di una debuttante o un imbottito gruppo di famiglia reale; è assai più probabile che sia un guizzo di fuoco rosso o i colori intensi di un grande fiore di giardino o qualcosa che è davvero elementare ed essenziale; qualcosa a suo modo altrettanto «crudo» (come direbbero i nostri cari amici) quanto la Grande Piramide o il grande pachiderma. I bambini non sono snob in arte più di quanto lo siano in morale. E se spesso provano piacere anche per le cose che sono davvero «graziose», nel senso di una fanciulla aggraziata del Greuze o di una nuvola di fiori rosa in primavera, è semplicemente perché vi è un posto perfettamente legittimo nell’arte per ciò che è grazioso; e non lo si liquida affatto biascicando due volte la stessa parola e chiamandolo «grazioso-grazioso». Comunque sia, i moderni più altezzosi commettono un grave abbaglio nell’imputare puerilità a difesa di certe cose che potrebbero essere difese solo in quanto puerili nel senso più alto. Fu Cézanne stesso a dire: «Cerco di ritrovare la visione diretta di un bambino».
It is the same with all the cant phrases already in circulation, for the purpose of defending any eccentricity, even before it exists. Thus everybody is familiar with the phrase that art is not photography, and that only photography is required to be realistic. Everybody is familiar with the phrase, and nobody is familiar with the holes or errors in the phrase. As a matter of fact nothing is less realistic than photography. At the very start it is cut away from all reality exactly as marble sculpture is cut away from reality, by being conventionally colourless; by divorcing the great optical union of colour and form. But it is not really realistic even about form. The thing it does reproduce more or less realistically is light and shade, and the light often falsifies the form and always falsifies the colour. If we want true form it must be drawn for us more or less abstractedly by a draughtsman; and when it is so drawn by Leonardo or Michelangelo, it cannot be dismissed as photographic, any more than as “pretty-pretty”. The modern artist may have his own reasons for drawing legs as if they were bolsters or sausages; but that does not make the strong sweeping lines, of sloping bone or gripping muscle, in a great Florentine drawing, a dull mechanical reproduction, valuable only as the vulgar snapshot of a trivial fact. Those lines are strong and beautiful, as the lines of waterfall and whirlpool are beautiful. In fact, they are exactly like the beautiful abstract forms, which the modern artist would like to invent— if he could.
I have taken only this one type, of the talk about new schools of art, to illustrate what I mean by saying that the world is in such a hurry to be new that it does not even pause upon the truths of the new school, let alone of the old. Of the million men and women who have heard those two phrases, how many have heard any phrases out of the opposite phraseology and philosophy? I mean any which offer a philosophical defence of the other philosophy? Of all those who have been told (somewhat needlessly) that Epstein does not profess to be pretty, how many have heard that case for civilisation, in which its very strength is shown in being able to rear and poise and protect prettiness? The very cyclopean massiveness of the foundations of the city is best proved in the fact that no earthquake can shake the ivory statuette upon the pedestal or the china shepherdess upon the shelf. How many have considered the more ancient argument, of a culture that is sufficiently athletic to be elegant? Or, to take another example, how many have understood the scientific and psychological arguments for antiquity itself? Of all those who can recall being told to admire a modern picture, merely because it is even more unlike life than a photograph, or being told to admire modern poetry, for no reason whatever except that it is more prosaic than slang— of all those, how many even remember the sound remark made long ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes; that the grand Latin poets actually grow grander by being quoted again and again; that the words actually grow together with time, as do the sections of a seasoned violin? I am not saying that the truth is all on the side of tradition; I am only saying that the publicity is all on the side of innovation. Until the recent rise of the Humanist group in America, hardly anybody, even of the educated classes, possessed even the vocabulary for a defence of tradition. The very words in use, the very structure of the sentences, the ordinary tone of the whole public Press, prevented me from using the real and reasonable arguments against mere novelty. England, strangely enough, has even less of a working Humanist vocabulary than America. Here also working journalistic ethics have been too much cut down and simplified to a few crude ideas, of commercial activity or continuous reform. I shall be completely misunderstood if I am supposed to be calling for a return ticket to Athens or to Eden; because I do not want to go on by the cheap train to Utopia. I want to go where I like. I want to stop where I like. I want to know the width as well as the length of the world; and to wander off the railway-track in the ancient plains of liberty.
Lo stesso vale per tutte le frasi fatte già in circolazione, allo scopo di difendere qualsiasi stravaganza, anche prima che esista. Così tutti hanno familiarità con la frase che l’arte non è fotografia, e che solo alla fotografia si richiede d’essere realistica. Tutti hanno familiarità con la frase, e nessuno ha familiarità con le falle o gli errori della frase. In verità nulla è meno realistico della fotografia. Fin dall’inizio essa è tagliata via da ogni realtà esattamente come la scultura di marmo è tagliata via dalla realtà, per il fatto d’essere convenzionalmente incolore; per il divorzio della grande unione ottica di colore e forma. Ma non è davvero realistica nemmeno riguardo alla forma. Ciò che essa riproduce più o meno realisticamente sono la luce e l’ombra, e la luce spesso falsa la forma e sempre falsa il colore. Se vogliamo la vera forma, essa dev’essere disegnata per noi più o meno astrattamente da un disegnatore; e quando è così disegnata da Leonardo o Michelangelo, non la si può liquidare come fotografica, non più che come «graziosa-graziosa». Il moderno artista potrà avere le sue ragioni per disegnare gambe come fossero cuscini o salsicce; ma ciò non fa delle robuste linee spazzanti, dell’osso in pendio o del muscolo che si tende, in un grande disegno fiorentino, una piatta riproduzione meccanica, di valore solo come la volgare istantanea di un fatto banale. Quelle linee sono forti e belle, come sono belle le linee della cascata e del gorgo. Anzi, sono esattamente come le belle forme astratte che il moderno artista vorrebbe inventare— se potesse.
Ho preso soltanto questo unico tipo, il discorso sulle nuove scuole d’arte, per illustrare ciò che intendo dicendo che il mondo ha tanta fretta d’esser nuovo da non soffermarsi nemmeno sulle verità della nuova scuola, non che su quelle della vecchia. Del milione di uomini e donne che hanno udito quelle due frasi, quanti hanno udito qualche frase della fraseologia e filosofia opposta? Voglio dire, qualcuna che offra una difesa filosofica dell’altra filosofia? Di tutti coloro cui è stato detto (in modo alquanto superfluo) che Epstein non pretende d’esser grazioso, quanti hanno udito quella difesa della civiltà, in cui la sua forza stessa si mostra nell’essere capace di allevare, librare e proteggere la grazia? La ciclopica massiccità stessa delle fondamenta della città è provata al meglio dal fatto che nessun terremoto può scuotere la statuetta d’avorio sul piedistallo o la pastorella di porcellana sulla mensola. Quanti hanno considerato l’argomento più antico, di una cultura che è sufficientemente atletica da poter essere elegante? O, per prendere un altro esempio, quanti hanno compreso gli argomenti scientifici e psicologici in favore dell’antichità stessa? Di tutti coloro che rammentano d’essersi sentiti dire d’ammirare un quadro moderno, semplicemente perché è ancora più dissimile dalla vita di quanto lo sia una fotografia, o di essersi sentiti dire d’ammirare la poesia moderna, per nessun’altra ragione se non che è più prosaica dello slang— di tutti costoro, quanti ricordano anche solo la giusta osservazione fatta tempo fa da Oliver Wendell Holmes; che i grandi poeti latini in realtà crescono più grandi a forza d’esser citati di continuo; che le parole in realtà crescono unite insieme col tempo, come fanno le parti di un violino stagionato? Non dico che la verità stia tutta dalla parte della tradizione; dico soltanto che la pubblicità sta tutta dalla parte dell’innovazione. Fino alla recente ascesa del gruppo umanista in America, quasi nessuno, nemmeno delle classi colte, possedeva anche solo il vocabolario per una difesa della tradizione. Le parole stesse in uso, la struttura stessa delle frasi, il tono ordinario di tutta la stampa pubblica, m’impedivano di usare gli argomenti reali e ragionevoli contro la mera novità. L’Inghilterra, per quanto strano, possiede un vocabolario umanista operante ancor minore dell’America. Anche qui l’etica giornalistica operante è stata troppo sfrondata e semplificata in poche idee grezze, di attività commerciale o di continua riforma. Sarò completamente frainteso se mi si suppone in cerca di un biglietto di ritorno per Atene o per l’Eden; perché non voglio proseguire sul treno a basso costo verso l’Utopia. Voglio andare dove mi piace. Voglio fermarmi dove mi piace. Voglio conoscere la larghezza non meno che la lunghezza del mondo; e vagabondare fuori dai binari nelle antiche pianure della libertà.
THE REAL DR. JOHNSON
It is possible that there are still people in England who do not adore Dr. Johnson. These persons must be removed, if possible, by persuasion. A short and plain attempt to persuade them must take precedence of subtler questions in every discussion of the great man. Now this old and superficial misunderstanding of Johnson (now nearly extinct) expresses itself in two main popular notions— that he was pedantic and that he was rude. He occasionally was rude; he never was pedantic. He was probably the most unpedantic man that ever lived; certainly you and I are much more pedantic than Dr. Johnson. For pedantry means the worship of dead words; and his words, whether long or short, were always alive. He played long words and short words against each other with impromptu but infallible art. I am far from books, and I quote from memory, but I think that a Scotchman, vexed at the ritual jeers of Johnson against his country, said: “Do you remember that God made Scotland?” Johnson replied promptly: “Sir, you are to remember that he made it for Scotchmen.” Then, after a pause, he said in grave meditation: “Comparisons are odious; but God made hell.” Now the vague popular opinion of Johnson would concentrate on long words like “comparisons” and “odious”, and retain the impression that he was pedantic. It would be just as easy to concentrate on words like “hell” and give the impression that he was vulgar. The only true way of testing the matter is to look at the whole sentence and ask oneself if there is a single word, long or short, out of its place. Johnson was the reverse of pedantic, for he used long words only where they would be effective. Generally it came to this, that he spoke pompously when Boswell spoke flippantly and flippantly when Boswell spoke pompously—a very sound rule. When Boswell confronted him with the brute facts of a lonely tower and a baby, he answered, with distant dignity: “Sir, I should not much like my company.” But when Boswell justified some morally backsliding bishop or vicar with that elaborate hash of sophistry and charity which is still used to excuse the rich, Johnson answered him with a few short words, so full of Christianity and common sense that I should not be allowed to print them.
The charge of rudeness is much more real; but about this also an impression still surviving requires a great deal of correction. Taken in conjunction with the charge of pedantry, it has created the image of a bullying schoolmaster, a superior person who thinks himself above good manners. Now Johnson was sometimes insolent, but he was never superior. He was not a despot, but exactly the reverse. It was his sense of the democracy of debate that made him loud and unscrupulous, like a mob. It was exactly because he thought the other men as clever as himself that he sought in desperate cases to bear them down by clamour. Everyone knows the brilliant description of him by one of his best friends: “If his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt of it.” But few realise that this is the act of a simple and heroic fellow fighting against a superior force. Johnson was a man of great animal impulsiveness and of irregular temper, but intellectually he was humble. He always went into every conflict with the idea that the other man was as good as he was, and that he might be defeated. His bellowings and bangings of the table were the expressions of a fundamental modesty. We can feel this element, I think, in everything he said, down to those last awful words upon his death-bed, when he spoke of Burke, the one man who had really excited and arrested him, “If I saw him now it would kill me.” His fate in these respects has been strange. He has been called the pedant par excellence because he was the one thoroughly unpedantic person of a pedantic age. He has been called a conversational tyrant, because he was the one man of his mental rank who was ready to argue with his inferiors. On the one hand it is often said that he translated English into Johnsonese. But let it be remembered that he was the only man of his time who could translate Johnsonese back into English. Half a hundred critics in that age might have said of a play, “It does not possess sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction”, but only Johnson could have said also, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.” There were numerous great men in the eighteenth century who kept a club or court of dependents, where they had things entirely their own way. I need not prove the point; the greatest satirist of that age has made the image immortal.
Like Cato gave his little Senate laws, And sat attentive to his own applause.
But Johnson was the reverse of attentive to people who were applauding him. Johnson was furiously deaf to people who were contradicting him. So far from being a stately and condescending king like Atticus, Johnson was a kind of Irish member in his own Parliament. All these are but broken and incidental examples; everything about the man rang of reality and honour; he never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon. We have all heard enough to fill a book about Dr. Johnson’s incivilities. I wish they would compile another book consisting of Dr. Johnson’s apologies. There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong; and Johnson behaved very well. He understood (what so many faultlessly polite people do not understand) that a stiff apology is a second insult. He understood that the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. Boswell once complained to him in private, explaining that he did not mind asperities while they were alone, but did not like to be torn to pieces in company. He added some idle figure of speech, some simile so trivial that I cannot even remember what it was. “Sir,” said Johnson, “that is one of the happiest similes I have ever heard.” He did not waste time in formally withdrawing this word with reservations and that word with explanations. Finding that he had given pain, he went out of his way to give pleasure. If he had not known what would irritate Boswell, he knew at least what would soothe him. It is this gigantic realism in Johnson’s kindness, the directness of his emotionalism, when he is emotional, that gives him his hold upon generations of living men. There is nothing elaborate about his ethics; he wants to know whether a man, as a fact, is happy or unhappy, is lying or telling the truth. He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder, but he can walk into the heart without knocking.
IL VERO DR. JOHNSON
È possibile che vi siano ancora, in Inghilterra, persone che non adorano il Dr. Johnson. Costoro devono essere rimossi, se possibile, con la persuasione. Un tentativo breve e schietto di persuaderli deve avere la precedenza su questioni più sottili in ogni discussione intorno al grand’uomo. Ora, questo antico e superficiale malinteso su Johnson (oggi quasi estinto) si esprime in due idee popolari principali: che fosse pedante e che fosse scortese. Scortese lo era di tanto in tanto; pedante non lo fu mai. Fu probabilmente l’uomo meno pedante che sia mai vissuto; di certo io e voi siamo assai più pedanti del Dr. Johnson. Poiché pedanteria significa il culto delle parole morte; e le sue parole, lunghe o brevi che fossero, erano sempre vive. Giocava le parole lunghe contro le brevi con arte estemporanea ma infallibile. Sono lontano dai libri, e cito a memoria, ma credo che uno scozzese, irritato dai rituali sarcasmi di Johnson contro il suo paese, gli dicesse: «Ricordate che Dio creò la Scozia?» Johnson replicò prontamente: «Signore, dovete ricordare che la creò per gli scozzesi.» Poi, dopo una pausa, soggiunse in grave meditazione: «I paragoni sono odiosi; ma Dio creò l’inferno.» Ora, la vaga opinione popolare su Johnson si concentrerebbe su parole lunghe come «paragoni» e «odiosi», e serberebbe l’impressione che egli fosse pedante. Sarebbe altrettanto facile concentrarsi su parole come «inferno» e dare l’impressione che fosse volgare. L’unico modo veritiero di saggiare la cosa è guardare l’intera frase e domandarsi se vi sia una sola parola, lunga o breve, fuori posto. Johnson era l’esatto contrario di un pedante, poiché usava le parole lunghe soltanto là dove sarebbero risultate efficaci. In generale, si riduceva a questo: parlava in tono pomposo quando Boswell parlava con leggerezza, e con leggerezza quando Boswell parlava in tono pomposo — regola quanto mai sensata. Quando Boswell lo mise di fronte ai fatti brutali di una torre solitaria e di un neonato, egli rispose, con distaccata dignità: «Signore, non gradirei molto la mia stessa compagnia.» Ma quando Boswell giustificava qualche vescovo o vicario moralmente traviato con quell’elaborato guazzabuglio di sofismi e di carità tuttora impiegato per scusare i ricchi, Johnson gli rispondeva con poche brevi parole, così colme di cristianesimo e di buon senso che non mi sarebbe consentito stamparle.
L’accusa di scortesia è assai più fondata; ma anche a questo proposito un’impressione ancora superstite richiede una buona dose di correzione. Congiunta all’accusa di pedanteria, essa ha creato l’immagine di un maestro di scuola prepotente, di un individuo altezzoso che si crede al di sopra delle buone maniere. Ora, Johnson era talvolta insolente, ma non fu mai altezzoso. Non era un despota, bensì esattamente il contrario. Era il suo senso della democrazia del dibattito a renderlo chiassoso e senza scrupoli, come una folla in tumulto. Era proprio perché riteneva gli altri intelligenti quanto lui che, nei casi disperati, cercava di sopraffarli col clamore. Tutti conoscono la brillante descrizione che ne fece uno dei suoi migliori amici: «Se la sua pistola fa fuoco a vuoto, vi atterra col calcio.» Ma pochi comprendono che questo è il gesto di un uomo semplice ed eroico che combatte contro una forza superiore. Johnson era un uomo di grande impulsività animale e di temperamento irregolare, ma intellettualmente era umile. Entrava sempre in ogni conflitto con l’idea che l’avversario valesse quanto lui, e che egli potesse essere sconfitto. I suoi muggiti e i suoi pugni battuti sul tavolo erano l’espressione di una modestia fondamentale. Possiamo avvertire questo elemento, credo, in tutto ciò che disse, fino a quelle ultime, terribili parole sul suo letto di morte, quando parlò di Burke, l’unico uomo che l’avesse davvero eccitato e avvinto: «Se lo vedessi ora, mi ucciderebbe.» Il suo destino, sotto questi aspetti, è stato singolare. È stato chiamato il pedante per eccellenza perché era l’unica persona del tutto priva di pedanteria in un’epoca pedante. È stato chiamato un tiranno della conversazione, perché era l’unico uomo del suo rango intellettuale disposto a discutere con i propri inferiori. Da un lato, si dice spesso che egli traducesse l’inglese in johnsonese. Ma si tenga a mente che fu l’unico uomo del suo tempo capace di ritradurre il johnsonese in inglese. Una cinquantina di critici, in quell’epoca, avrebbero potuto dire di una commedia: «Non possiede vitalità sufficiente a preservarla dalla putrefazione», ma solo Johnson avrebbe saputo aggiungere anche: «Non ha spirito abbastanza per mantenersi fresca.» Vi furono numerosi grandi uomini, nel Settecento, che tenevano un circolo o una corte di dipendenti, dove ogni cosa andava interamente a modo loro. Non mi occorre dimostrarlo; il più grande satirico di quell’epoca ne ha reso immortale l’immagine.
Come Catone dava leggi al suo piccolo Senato, e sedeva attento al proprio applauso.
Ma Johnson era tutt’altro che attento a chi lo applaudiva. Johnson era furiosamente sordo a chi lo contraddiceva. Ben lungi dall’essere un re maestoso e condiscendente come Attico, Johnson era una sorta di deputato irlandese nel suo stesso Parlamento. Tutti questi non sono che esempi frammentari e occasionali; ogni cosa in quell’uomo risuonava di realtà e d’onore; non si credette mai nel giusto senza essere pronto a dar battaglia; non si credette mai in torto senza essere pronto a chiedere perdono. Ne abbiamo udito abbastanza, tutti quanti, da riempire un libro sulle scortesie del Dr. Johnson. Vorrei che ne compilassero un altro, fatto delle scuse del Dr. Johnson. Non v’è prova migliore della cavalleria e dell’integrità ultima di un uomo del modo in cui si comporta quando ha torto; e Johnson si comportò molto bene. Egli comprendeva (ciò che tante persone irreprensibilmente cortesi non comprendono) che una scusa rigida è un secondo insulto. Comprendeva che la parte offesa non desidera essere risarcita perché ha subìto un torto; desidera essere guarita perché è stata ferita. Boswell una volta si lamentò con lui in privato, spiegando che non gli dispiacevano le asprezze quando erano soli, ma non gradiva essere fatto a pezzi in compagnia. Aggiunse qualche oziosa figura retorica, una similitudine così banale che non riesco nemmeno a ricordare quale fosse. «Signore», disse Johnson, «questa è una delle similitudini più felici che io abbia mai udito.» Non perse tempo a ritrattare formalmente questa parola con riserve e quell’altra con spiegazioni. Accortosi di aver dato dolore, si diede pena per dare piacere. Se non aveva saputo che cosa avrebbe irritato Boswell, sapeva almeno che cosa l’avrebbe rasserenato. È questo gigantesco realismo nella bontà di Johnson, la schiettezza del suo sentimentalismo, quando è commosso, a dargli presa su generazioni di uomini vivi. Non v’è nulla di elaborato nella sua etica; vuol sapere se un uomo, di fatto, è felice o infelice, se mente o dice la verità. Può sembrare che egli martelli il cervello per lunghe notti di frastuono e tuono, ma sa entrare nel cuore senza bussare.
RABELAISIAN REGRETS
There has arisen in our time an extraordinary notion that there is something humane, open-hearted or generous about refusing to define one’s creed. Obviously the very opposite is the truth. Refusing to define a creed is not only not generous, it is distinctly mean. It fails in frankness and fraternity towards the enemy. It is fighting without a flag or a declaration of war. It denies to the enemy the decent concessions of battle; the right to know the policy and to treat with the headquarters. Modern “broad-mindedness” has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavours to win without giving itself away, even after it has won. It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor. For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.
In the things of conviction there is only one other thing besides a dogma, and that is a prejudice. If there is something in your life for which you will hold meetings and agitate and write letters to the newspaper, but for which you will not find the plain terms of a creed, then that thing is properly to be described as a prejudice, however new or noble or advanced it may seem to be. But indeed I think that when these ages are seen in proper perspective, men will say that the chief mark of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the growth of vast and victorious prejudices. I give, in passing, some instances of what I mean. Thus, for instance, it is a brave and logical creed which declares, like Mahomet and some modern Puritans, that the drinking of fermented liquor is really wrong. But the modern world has not adopted this clear creed and never will. What it has done has been to spread everywhere a strong but vague prejudice against certain forms of drinking, particularly those adopted by the poor. We have not made it wicked to drink ale, but we have made it slightly disreputable to go into a public-house. In other words, we have made it slightly disreputable, if you drink ale, to be poor or to be sociable. What it comes to is this: that any one wishing to sneer at me can get a laugh by saying I am a beer-drinker, but he will not commit himself to the statement that the thing that he has sneered at is wrong. He may hit me, because he is appealing to a prejudice; but I may not hit him because he is not appealing to a creed. He will not set anything up for me to hit. He wants, somehow or other, to avoid calling liquor wrong and yet to call me wrong for touching liquor. This is not latitudinarianism; it is ordinary human cowardice.
There are a great many other instances which could be given. For instance, fashionable opinion does not actually declare (as do, I believe, certain Eastern religions) that ablutions and bodily cleanliness are primary things, above even ordinary morals; but it does create a loose popular impression that it has scored off a personality or a nation more by saying that it is dirty than by saying that it is avaricious or timid or unchaste. No new creed is preached about cleanliness, but a strong sentimental emphasis and partiality is attached to the thing, making it more important than other things. Of course cleanliness is only made so very important at present because it happens to be a thing quite easy for the rich and very difficult for the poor. My only concern here, however, is to point out the method by which it has been made important; never by explaining or defining its importance, as in a creed; always by assuming its importance, as in a prejudice. I have no space to go at length into other examples, but the reader can easily put the cases to himself; and he can employ this general test: that in the case of half the most typical movements of the last thirty years, nobody can say how or when they really began. In no barbaric twilight or tangled forest or confusion of the dark ages did huge forces ever come so silently or secretly into the world as they come to-day. No one knows or can name the real beginning of Imperialism or of the popularity of the Royal Family (a thing quite recent yet quite untraceable), or of the taking for granted, in so many minds, of the materialist philosophy or of the practical imposition of teetotalism as a discipline on the Nonconformist public ministry. These things come out of the night and are formless even when they are forming everything else.
But discussions on the subject of the Censor and other theatrical problems have brought before the public a supreme instance of what I mean. We have been asked for the hundredth time to find some solution of that problem of the combination in art of truth with sexual modesty; and the result of considering this has been that we find ourselves face to face with a profound and most important change in public opinion on this subject; a change that has been going on, perhaps, for the last twenty years, perhaps ever since the coming of the Puritans; but a change which is, at any rate, of the utmost import to the wholesomeness of ethics, and a change which has proceeded in the same powerful silence as the growth of a tree. It is this difference between new English and old English ethics in the matter of verbal delicacy of which I wish to speak here. The subject is difficult, it is even emotional and painful; and I think it will do no harm to begin with some of the general human principles of the problem, even if they are as old and obvious as the alphabet.
There is not really much difference of opinion among normal men about the first principles of decency in expression. All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane. There are people, indeed, who maintain that they would talk of this topic as coldly or openly as of any other; there are people who maintain that they would walk naked down the street. But these people are not only insane people, they are in the most emphatic sense of the word stupid people. They do not think; they only point (as children do) and say “Why?” Even children only do it when they are tired; but exactly this tired quality is most of what passes in our time not only for thought but for bold and disturbing thought. To ask, “Why cannot we discuss sex coolly and rationally anywhere?” is a tired and unintelligent question. It is like asking, “Why does not a man walk on his hands as well as on his feet?” It is silly. If a man walked systematically on his hands, they would not be hands, but feet. And if love or lust were things that we could all discuss without any possible emotion they would not be love or lust, they would be something else—some mechanical function or abstract natural duty which may or may not exist in animals or in angels, but which has nothing at all to do with the sexuality we are talking about. All the ideas of grasp or gesture, which to us make up the meaning of the word “hand”, depend upon the fact that hands are loose extremities used not for walking on but for waving about. And all that we mean when we speak of “sex” is involved in the fact that it is not an unconscious or innocent thing, but a special and violent emotional stimulation at once spiritual and physical. A man who asks us to have no emotion in sex is asking us to have no emotion in emotion. He has forgotten the subject-matter with which he deals. He has lost the topic of the conversation. It may be said of him, in the strict meaning of the words, that he does not know what he is talking about.
RIMPIANTI RABELAISIANI
È sorta ai nostri giorni una singolare convinzione: che vi sia qualcosa di umano, di aperto o di generoso nel rifiutarsi di definire il proprio credo. Ovviamente è vero l’esatto contrario, ed è questa la verità. Rifiutarsi di definire un credo non solo non è generoso, ma è addirittura meschino. Manca di franchezza e di fraternità verso il nemico. È combattere senza bandiera e senza dichiarazione di guerra. Nega al nemico le decorose concessioni della battaglia: il diritto di conoscere la strategia e di trattare col quartier generale. La moderna «larghezza di vedute» possiede una qualità che non si può definire se non subdola: si ingegna di vincere senza scoprirsi, e questo persino dopo aver vinto. Aspira a essere vittoriosa senza tradire nemmeno il nome del vincitore. Poiché tutti gli uomini sani di mente hanno dottrine intellettuali e teorie combattive; e se non le vogliono mettere in tavola, è solo perché desiderano godersi il vantaggio di una teoria combattiva che non si può combattere.
Nelle cose della convinzione non esiste che un’altra cosa oltre al dogma, ed è il pregiudizio. Se c’è qualcosa nella vostra vita per cui volete tenere assemblee, agitarvi e scrivere lettere ai giornali, ma per cui non riuscite a trovare i termini chiari di un credo, allora quella cosa va propriamente definita un pregiudizio, per quanto nuova, nobile o progressista possa sembrare. Ma anzi io penso che, quando queste epoche saranno viste nella loro giusta prospettiva, gli uomini diranno che il segno distintivo della fine del secolo diciannovesimo e dell’inizio del ventesimo fu il proliferare di vasti e vittoriosi pregiudizi. Ne offro di passaggio qualche esempio, per farmi intendere. Così, per esempio, è un credo coraggioso e logico quello che dichiara, come Maometto e certi puritani moderni, che bere liquori fermentati sia realmente un male. Ma il mondo moderno non ha adottato questo credo limpido, e non lo adotterà mai. Ciò che ha fatto è stato diffondere ovunque un pregiudizio forte ma vago contro certe forme del bere, in particolare quelle proprie dei poveri. Non abbiamo reso peccaminoso il bere birra, ma abbiamo reso lievemente disdicevole l’entrare in un’osteria. In altre parole, abbiamo reso lievemente disdicevole, se bevi birra, l’essere povero o l’essere socievole. Ciò a cui si riduce è questo: che chiunque voglia beffarsi di me può strappare una risata dicendo che sono un bevitore di birra, ma non si comprometterà con l’affermazione che la cosa di cui si è fatto beffe sia un male. Egli può colpirmi, perché fa appello a un pregiudizio; ma io non posso colpirlo, perché non fa appello a un credo. Non mi metterà davanti nulla da colpire. Vuole, in un modo o nell’altro, evitare di chiamare il liquore un male e insieme chiamare me un colpevole per averlo toccato. Questo non è latitudinarismo; è ordinaria vigliaccheria umana.
Vi sono moltissimi altri esempi che si potrebbero addurre. Per esempio, l’opinione alla moda non dichiara esplicitamente (come fanno, credo, certe religioni orientali) che le abluzioni e la pulizia del corpo siano cose primarie, superiori persino alla morale ordinaria; ma crea l’impressione diffusa e vaga di aver segnato un punto contro una persona o una nazione più dicendola sporca che dicendola avara, timida o impudica. Nessun credo nuovo viene predicato riguardo alla pulizia, ma alla cosa si annette una forte enfasi sentimentale e una parzialità, che la rende più importante di altre cose. Naturalmente la pulizia è resa oggi così importante solo perché si dà il caso che sia una cosa assai facile per i ricchi e assai difficile per i poveri. La mia sola preoccupazione, qui, è però quella di indicare il metodo con cui essa è stata resa importante: mai spiegandone o definendone l’importanza, come in un credo; sempre presupponendone l’importanza, come in un pregiudizio. Non ho spazio per addentrarmi in altri esempi, ma il lettore può facilmente porsi da sé i casi; e può servirsi di questo criterio generale: che per metà dei movimenti più tipici degli ultimi trent’anni nessuno sa dire come o quando siano realmente cominciati. In nessun crepuscolo barbarico, in nessuna foresta intricata, in nessuna confusione dei secoli bui forze immense fecero mai il loro ingresso nel mondo così silenziosamente e segretamente come oggi. Nessuno conosce o sa nominare il vero inizio dell’Imperialismo, o della popolarità della Famiglia Reale (cosa affatto recente eppure affatto irrintracciabile), o del dare per scontata, in tante menti, la filosofia materialista, o dell’imposizione pratica dell’astinenza alcolica come disciplina al ministero pubblico dei nonconformisti. Queste cose emergono dalla notte e sono informi persino quando danno forma a tutto il resto.
Ma le discussioni sul tema della Censura e altri problemi teatrali hanno posto davanti al pubblico un esempio supremo di ciò che intendo. Ci è stato chiesto per la centesima volta di trovare qualche soluzione a quel problema della combinazione, nell’arte, della verità con il pudore sessuale; e il risultato del rifletterci è stato che ci troviamo faccia a faccia con un profondo e importantissimo mutamento dell’opinione pubblica su questo tema; un mutamento che è in corso, forse, da vent’anni, forse dall’avvento dei puritani; ma un mutamento che è, in ogni caso, della massima importanza per la salubrità dell’etica, e un mutamento che è proceduto nel medesimo potente silenzio della crescita di un albero. È di questa differenza tra la nuova etica inglese e la vecchia etica inglese, in materia di delicatezza verbale, che desidero parlare qui. Il tema è difficile, è persino emotivo e doloroso; e penso che non farà male cominciare con alcuni dei principi umani generali del problema, anche se sono vecchi e ovvi come l’alfabeto.
Non c’è in realtà molta differenza di opinione, tra gli uomini normali, sui primi principi della decenza nell’espressione. Tutti gli uomini sani, antichi e moderni, occidentali e orientali, ritengono che nel sesso vi sia una furia che non possiamo permetterci di infiammare; e che un certo mistero debba avvolgere l’istinto, se vuole rimanere delicato e sano. Vi sono, in verità, persone che sostengono che parlerebbero di questo argomento con la stessa freddezza e franchezza con cui parlerebbero di qualsiasi altro; vi sono persone che sostengono che camminerebbero nude per la strada. Ma queste persone non sono soltanto folli, sono, nel senso più enfatico del termine, stupide. Non pensano; si limitano a indicare (come fanno i bambini) e a dire «Perché?». Anche i bambini lo fanno solo quando sono stanchi; ma è esattamente questa qualità stanca ciò che ai nostri giorni passa non solo per pensiero, ma per pensiero audace e sconvolgente. Chiedere: «Perché non possiamo discutere del sesso in modo freddo e razionale, dovunque?» è una domanda stanca e priva d’intelligenza. È come chiedere: «Perché un uomo non cammina sulle mani così bene come sui piedi?». È sciocco. Se un uomo camminasse sistematicamente sulle mani, quelle non sarebbero più mani, ma piedi. E se l’amore o la libidine fossero cose di cui tutti potessimo discutere senza alcuna possibile emozione, non sarebbero più amore o libidine, sarebbero qualcos’altro: qualche funzione meccanica o astratto dovere naturale che può esistere o meno negli animali o negli angeli, ma che non ha assolutamente nulla a che vedere con la sessualità di cui stiamo parlando. Tutte le idee di presa o di gesto, che per noi costituiscono il significato della parola «mano», dipendono dal fatto che le mani sono estremità libere, usate non per camminarvi sopra ma per agitarle nell’aria. E tutto ciò che intendiamo quando parliamo di «sesso» è implicato nel fatto che non è una cosa inconscia o innocente, ma una speciale e violenta stimolazione emotiva a un tempo spirituale e fisica. Un uomo che ci chiede di non avere emozione nel sesso ci chiede di non avere emozione nell’emozione. Ha dimenticato la materia di cui tratta. Ha perduto l’argomento della conversazione. Si può dire di lui, nel senso stretto delle parole, che non sa di che cosa stia parlando.
And if men have never doubted that there should be a decorum in such things, neither have they ever doubted that that decorum might be carried much too far; that courage and laughter and wholesome truth might be sacrificed to the proprieties. So far, I say, humanity is essentially unanimous. It is in the discussion as to which thing shall be suppressed and which permitted, in the selection of the more harmless from the more harmful types of candour, that we begin to find the difference between different civilisations and different religions among men. And it is exactly upon the point of such a difference as this that I wish to speak here. Among other societies and ages our own society and age has made a choice in this matter. We have said, substantially by a general feeling, that one kind of expression shall be allowed and another rendered impossible. We have chosen, and I think we have chosen wrong.
Before going deeper into this most difficult subject there is at least one general statement to be made. The evil of excess in this matter really consists of three quite separate evils. Verbal impropriety or excess can spring from three quite different motives, three quite different states of mind, which have really very little to do with each other. It is necessary to unpick these three strands before we go any further. Ordinary popular discussion of the problem always hopelessly mixes them up. Briefly, they may be stated thus: impropriety arises either from a really vicious spirit, or from the love of emphasis, or from the love of analysis.
The first can be dismissed with brevity and with relief. There is such a thing as pornography; as a system of deliberate erotic stimulants. That is not a thing to be argued about with one’s intellect, but to be stamped on with one’s heel. But the point about it to be noted for our purpose is that this form of excess is separated from the other two by the fact that the motive of it must be bad. If a man tries to excite a sex instinct which is too strong already, and that in its meanest form, he must be a scoundrel. He is either taking money to degrade his kind or else he is acting on that mystical itch of the evil man to make others evil, which is the strangest secret in hell.
But when we come to the two motives of emphasis and of analysis, it is essential to observe that in both cases the motive may be beautiful, even when the result is most disastrous. The motive for impropriety arising out of emphasis can be best illustrated by a comparison with the habit of swearing. Swearing is, of course, the strongest possible argument for the religious view of life. A man cannot satisfactorily affirm anything about this world except by getting out of this world. The things commonly called fables are so true that they alone can give final ratification even to the things commonly called facts. A man in Balham cannot even call his dog a good dog without summoning to his aid either the angels or the devils. The Balhamite, like the Roman, if he cannot bend the gods will move Acheron; but he never thinks of trying to move Balham. Religion is his only resort for purposes of real emphasis; and often, even when he is attacking religion, his instinctive way of attacking it is to say that it is a damned lie. The most natural way of talking is the supernatural way of talking. And indeed this may be considered a good working test for all modern fads and philosophies which pretend to be religions. The new faiths founded on evolution or an impersonal ethic are always claiming, that they also can produce holiness; and no Christian has any right in Christian charity to deny that possibility. But if the question really is whether the things in question are religions in the sense that Christianity or Mohammedanism are religions, then I should suggest a different test. I should not ask whether they can produce holiness, but whether they can produce profanity. Can any one swear by ethics? Can any one blaspheme evolution? Many men now hold that a mere adoration of abstract morality or goodness is the core and sole necessity of religion. I know many of them; I know that their lives are noble, and their intellects just. But (I say it with respect and even hesitation) would not their oaths be a little mild? I do not mean that they ought to swear, or that anybody ought to swear, I mean that if it comes to swearing one can see in such a competition the vast difference in actuality between the new sham religion which talks about the holiness within, and an old practical religion which worshipped a real holiness without. You can see the difference in the weakness of the oaths considered as literature. The man of the Christian Churches said (occasionally), “Oh, my God!” The man of the ethical societies says (presumably), “Oh, my goodness!”
It is generally true, I say, that the whole circle of this physical universe does not contain anything strong enough for the purposes of a man who really means what he says; even about a small dog. Yet there is one exception to this generalisation. There is one thing which belongs to this world, but which is yet so fierce and startling, so full of menace and ecstasy, that it seems at times to partake of the character of miracle. This thing is the thing called sex; and on this also from time to time the man with the small dog in Balham will call in his dire need. Men used to swear by their heads; they still in a manner swear by their bodies. Sex is actual enough to swear by. To take but one coarse democratic test, people scribble about it on walls as they do about religion. Nobody ever scribbled on a wall about ethics. Above all, the language of sex can be used as a kind of violent invocation; a reinforcement of common words by the strongest words. I will not pause here to ask the reason of this; whether saying “damn” and saying other things unprintable have something to do with the fact that sex is the great business of the body, and salvation the great business of the soul. It is enough to say that any one can read the thing I mean and any one can hear it. He can read the thing best perhaps in Aristophanes or in Rabelais. He can hear the thing best in the street outside.
E se gli uomini non hanno mai dubitato che debba esserci un decoro in tali cose, neppure hanno mai dubitato che quel decoro possa essere spinto troppo oltre; che il coraggio, il riso e la sana verità possano essere sacrificati alle convenienze. Fin qui, dico, l’umanità è essenzialmente unanime. È nella discussione su quale cosa debba essere soppressa e quale permessa, nella scelta dei tipi più innocui rispetto ai tipi più dannosi di franchezza, che cominciamo a trovare la differenza tra le diverse civiltà e le diverse religioni degli uomini. Ed è esattamente sul punto di una differenza come questa che desidero parlare qui. Tra le altre società ed epoche, la nostra società e la nostra epoca hanno operato una scelta in questa materia. Abbiamo detto, per lo più attraverso un sentimento generale, che un certo tipo di espressione sarà consentito e un altro reso impossibile. Abbiamo scelto, e io penso che abbiamo scelto male.
Prima di addentrarci più a fondo in questo tema difficilissimo, c’è almeno un’osservazione generale da fare. Il male dell’eccesso in questa materia consiste in realtà di tre mali del tutto distinti. L’improprietà o l’eccesso verbale può scaturire da tre moventi assai diversi, tre stati d’animo assai diversi, che in realtà hanno pochissimo a che fare l’uno con l’altro. È necessario districare questi tre fili prima di procedere oltre. L’ordinaria discussione popolare del problema li confonde sempre irrimediabilmente. In breve, si possono enunciare così: l’improprietà nasce o da uno spirito realmente vizioso, o dall’amore dell’enfasi, o dall’amore dell’analisi.
Il primo può essere liquidato con brevità e con sollievo. Esiste una cosa come la pornografia, come sistema di deliberati stimolanti erotici. Non è una cosa su cui discutere con l’intelletto, ma da schiacciare col tacco. Ma il punto da notare a nostro scopo è che questa forma di eccesso è separata dalle altre due dal fatto che il suo movente deve essere cattivo. Se un uomo cerca di eccitare un istinto sessuale che è già fin troppo forte, e per giunta nella sua forma più meschina, dev’essere un mascalzone. O prende denaro per degradare i suoi simili, oppure agisce secondo quel mistico prurito dell’uomo malvagio di rendere malvagi gli altri, che è il segreto più strano dell’inferno.
Ma quando veniamo ai due moventi dell’enfasi e dell’analisi, è essenziale osservare che in entrambi i casi il movente può essere bello, anche quando il risultato è più disastroso. Il movente dell’improprietà che nasce dall’enfasi può essere illustrato al meglio con un paragone con l’abitudine di bestemmiare. La bestemmia è, naturalmente, il più forte argomento possibile a favore della concezione religiosa della vita. Un uomo non può affermare in modo soddisfacente alcunché di questo mondo se non uscendo da questo mondo. Le cose comunemente chiamate favole sono così vere che esse sole possono dare la ratifica ultima persino alle cose comunemente chiamate fatti. Un uomo di Balham non può nemmeno chiamare buono il suo cane senza convocare in suo aiuto o gli angeli o i diavoli. L’abitante di Balham, come il romano, se non può piegare gli dèi smuoverà l’Acheronte; ma non pensa mai di provare a smuovere Balham. La religione è la sua unica risorsa quando si tratta di vera enfasi; e spesso, persino quando attacca la religione, il suo modo istintivo di attaccarla è dire che è una maledetta menzogna. Il modo più naturale di parlare è il modo soprannaturale di parlare. E in verità questo può essere considerato un buon criterio pratico per tutte le mode e le filosofie moderne che pretendono di essere religioni. Le nuove fedi fondate sull’evoluzione o su un’etica impersonale pretendono sempre di poter produrre anch’esse santità; e nessun cristiano ha il diritto, in cristiana carità, di negare tale possibilità. Ma se la questione è davvero se le cose in oggetto siano religioni nel senso in cui il Cristianesimo o il maomettanesimo sono religioni, allora io suggerirei un criterio diverso. Non domanderei se possono produrre santità, ma se possono produrre bestemmia. Può qualcuno giurare per l’etica? Può qualcuno bestemmiare l’evoluzione? Molti uomini oggi ritengono che una semplice adorazione della moralità o della bontà astratta sia il nucleo e l’unica necessità della religione. Ne conosco molti; so che le loro vite sono nobili e i loro intelletti retti. Ma (lo dico con rispetto e persino con esitazione) non sarebbero le loro imprecazioni un po’ fiacche? Non intendo dire che dovrebbero bestemmiare, o che chiunque dovrebbe bestemmiare; intendo dire che, se si viene al bestemmiare, si può vedere in una simile gara la vasta differenza di sostanza tra la nuova religione fittizia che parla della santità interiore e una vecchia religione pratica che adorava una santità reale esteriore. Si può vedere la differenza nella debolezza delle imprecazioni considerate come letteratura. L’uomo delle Chiese cristiane diceva (all’occasione): «Oh, mio Dio!». L’uomo delle società etiche dice (presumibilmente): «Oh, cielo!».
È generalmente vero, io dico, che l’intero cerchio di questo universo fisico non contiene nulla di abbastanza forte per gli scopi di un uomo che intende davvero ciò che dice, anche solo a proposito di un cagnolino. Eppure c’è un’eccezione a questa generalizzazione. C’è una cosa che appartiene a questo mondo, ma che è tuttavia così feroce e sorprendente, così colma di minaccia ed estasi, da sembrare a tratti partecipe del carattere del miracolo. Questa cosa è la cosa chiamata sesso; e anche a essa, di tempo in tempo, l’uomo col cagnolino a Balham farà ricorso nel suo estremo bisogno. Gli uomini un tempo giuravano sulla loro testa; ancora oggi, in un certo modo, giurano sul loro corpo. Il sesso è abbastanza reale da giurarci sopra. Per prendere un solo rozzo criterio democratico, la gente lo scarabocchia sui muri come fa con la religione. Nessuno ha mai scarabocchiato su un muro a proposito dell’etica. Soprattutto, il linguaggio del sesso può essere usato come una sorta di violenta invocazione, un rafforzamento delle parole comuni per mezzo delle parole più forti. Non mi fermerò qui a chiederne la ragione; se il dire «dannazione» e il dire altre cose innominabili abbiano qualcosa a che fare col fatto che il sesso è il grande affare del corpo e la salvezza il grande affare dell’anima. Basti dire che chiunque può leggere la cosa che intendo e chiunque può udirla. La può leggere al meglio, forse, in Aristofane o in Rabelais. La può udire al meglio nella strada là fuori.
But though he can find it in the street outside, he cannot find it in any of the books or newspapers sold in the street. There is no law against indecent ideas; but there is a quite efficient and practical law against indecent words. Slowly throughout the eighteenth century word after word was dropped until by the Victorian time it was insisted that no coarse phrases should be used even in defending coarseness. I am myself under the limitations of this very local prejudice. I am compelled to prove my case in many pages because I have to talk as one talks in a respectable magazine. I could prove my case in ten minutes if I could talk as two respectable married men really talk on the top of an omnibus. It is sufficient, however, to put the matter thus: When a navvy uses what is called obscene language it is almost always to express his righteous disgust at obscene conduct. And here the navvy is at one with all the most really masculine poets or romancers; he is at one with Rabelais, with Swift, and even with Browning. Browning uses a foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who profess sympathy with human sorrows merely out of their own morbidity. You can find the phrase in “At the Mermaid.” Browning uses the same foul metaphor to express the foulness of those who cannot understand a man’s prompt grasp of the presence of a good woman. You can find the phrase in the speech of Capponsacchi. In short, the emphatic use of sexual language has this great advantage that it is commonly used purely in the interests of virtue. The virtuous cabman may (and does) call a man a blank, in a state of furious and innocent horror at the idea of any one being a blank. But this is not true in the case of the third impulse to indecorum. The third impulse is that which I have called the analytical; the mere curiosity of the mind about how the relations of the sexes are to be considered and classified. This covers all that we now call the Problem Play, and all that we associate with the realistic and psychological novel, and all the millions of proposals for the rearrangement of marriage. The dialogue in The Little Eyolf horrified many people; but it did not contain a single coarse word. Mr. George Moore, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, and the lady called “Victoria Cross” have in turn been accused of being needlessly daring; but not one of them dare use words straight out of Bunyan or the Bible. The analytic indecency is now more free than it ever was among free men. The emphatic indecency is more stifled than it ever was among free men; more stifled than it ever was among slaves.
I am not concerned here to deny that the modern fashion of analysing sex is in general a good thing. Certainly there is grossly too much hypocrisy about sex; not in the English people, but in the literature and journalism which the English people, for some incomprehensible reason, permit to speak for them. There is no hypocrisy on the top of an English omnibus; but I warmly agree that there is really too much hypocrisy in the front page of an English newspaper, or within the covers of an English book. Let us agree that Ibsen had a right to suggest that marriage is an unpleasant fact as well as a pleasant one; that as well as the more chivalrous side of sex which is exaggerated by the Victorian poets, there is also the realistic and scientific side of sex, which was exaggerated by the old monks. Let me concede altogether and at once the fact that the modern tendency to dissect sex and to subdivide it, to put it into pigeon-holes, is a just and necessary measure. I will not even say here that the tendency has gone too far. But I will say this: what will you do if it does go too far? Suppose you wake up some fine morning and find indecencies which are quite ludicrous being taken quite seriously. Suppose you find certain sins put in a pigeon-hole when they ought to be put in a dust-hole. Suppose that after twenty years of scientific study you find that you have all the dirty jokes back again, the only difference being that you must enjoy them without laughing at them. Suppose, in short, that you are confronted with the exasperating spectacle of people chewing sins, instead of spitting them out of their mouths like their fathers; what will you do then? How will you express your feelings if you are faced with that horrible fashion of taking sex seriously—of which the true name is Phallic Worship? I know what you will do: you will call upon the shades of Rabelais and Fielding to deliver you out of that foul idolatry; and perhaps the English people will answer you and speak. It is common enough to talk of the English people speaking; but if ever they do speak they will speak as Rabelais spoke, and as English cabmen speak now.
Ma per quanto possa trovarla nella strada là fuori, non può trovarla in nessuno dei libri o dei giornali venduti per strada. Non c’è legge contro le idee indecenti; ma c’è una legge assai efficace e pratica contro le parole indecenti. Lentamente, nel corso del secolo diciottesimo, parola dopo parola fu abbandonata, finché all’epoca vittoriana si pretese che nessuna frase volgare fosse usata nemmeno per difendere la volgarità. Io stesso sono soggetto ai limiti di questo pregiudizio tutto locale. Sono costretto a dimostrare la mia tesi in molte pagine perché devo parlare come si parla in una rivista rispettabile. Potrei dimostrare la mia tesi in dieci minuti se potessi parlare come parlano davvero due rispettabili uomini sposati sull’imperiale di un omnibus. È sufficiente, tuttavia, porre la cosa così: quando uno sterratore usa quello che si chiama linguaggio osceno, è quasi sempre per esprimere il suo giusto disgusto per una condotta oscena. E qui lo sterratore fa tutt’uno con i più autenticamente virili tra i poeti o i romanzieri; fa tutt’uno con Rabelais, con Swift e persino con Browning. Browning usa una metafora immonda per esprimere l’immondizia di coloro che professano solidarietà per i dolori umani soltanto per la propria morbosità. La frase la trovate in «At the Mermaid». Browning usa la stessa metafora immonda per esprimere l’immondizia di coloro che non sanno comprendere la prontezza con cui un uomo coglie la presenza di una donna buona. La frase la trovate nel discorso di Capponsacchi. In breve, l’uso enfatico del linguaggio sessuale ha questo grande vantaggio: che comunemente è usato puramente nell’interesse della virtù. Il vetturino virtuoso può (e lo fa) chiamare un uomo con un termine puntinato, in uno stato di furioso e innocente orrore all’idea che qualcuno possa essere un tale termine puntinato. Ma questo non è vero nel caso del terzo impulso all’indecenza. Il terzo impulso è quello che ho chiamato analitico: la mera curiosità della mente su come i rapporti tra i sessi debbano essere considerati e classificati. Questo abbraccia tutto ciò che oggi chiamiamo il dramma a tesi, e tutto ciò che associamo al romanzo realistico e psicologico, e i milioni di proposte per il riordinamento del matrimonio. Il dialogo in The Little Eyolf inorridì molte persone; ma non conteneva una sola parola volgare. Mr. George Moore, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne e la signora che si firma «Victoria Cross» sono stati accusati, a turno, di essere inutilmente audaci; ma nessuno di loro osa usare parole tratte di peso da Bunyan o dalla Bibbia. L’indecenza analitica è oggi più libera di quanto sia mai stata tra uomini liberi. L’indecenza enfatica è più soffocata di quanto sia mai stata tra uomini liberi; più soffocata di quanto sia mai stata tra gli schiavi.
Non mi propongo qui di negare che la moda moderna di analizzare il sesso sia in generale una cosa buona. Certo c’è troppa, grossolana ipocrisia intorno al sesso; non nel popolo inglese, ma nella letteratura e nel giornalismo che il popolo inglese, per qualche incomprensibile ragione, permette di parlare in suo nome. Non c’è ipocrisia sull’imperiale di un omnibus inglese; ma convengo di buon grado che c’è davvero troppa ipocrisia nella prima pagina di un giornale inglese, o tra le copertine di un libro inglese. Conveniamo pure che Ibsen aveva il diritto di suggerire che il matrimonio è un fatto spiacevole così come piacevole; che, così come il lato più cavalleresco del sesso, esagerato dai poeti vittoriani, c’è anche il lato realistico e scientifico del sesso, che fu esagerato dai vecchi monaci. Concedo del tutto e senz’altro il fatto che la tendenza moderna a sezionare il sesso e a suddividerlo, a sistemarlo in caselle, sia una misura giusta e necessaria. Non dirò nemmeno, qui, che la tendenza si è spinta troppo oltre. Ma dirò questo: che cosa farete se davvero si spingerà troppo oltre? Supponete di svegliarvi un bel mattino e di trovare che indecenze del tutto ridicole vengono prese del tutto sul serio. Supponete di trovare certi peccati messi in una casella quando dovrebbero essere messi in una pattumiera. Supponete che, dopo vent’anni di studio scientifico, scopriate di ritrovarvi tra le mani tutte le barzellette sconce di prima, con l’unica differenza che dovrete gustarvele senza riderne. Supponete, in breve, di trovarvi davanti l’esasperante spettacolo di gente che mastica i peccati, invece di sputarli fuori dalla bocca come facevano i loro padri; che cosa farete allora? Come esprimerete i vostri sentimenti se vi troverete di fronte a quell’orribile moda di prendere il sesso sul serio, il cui vero nome è Culto Fallico? So che cosa farete: invocherete le ombre di Rabelais e di Fielding perché vi liberino da quella immonda idolatria; e forse il popolo inglese vi risponderà e parlerà. È abbastanza comune parlare del popolo inglese che parla; ma se mai parlerà, parlerà come parlava Rabelais, e come parlano ora i vetturini inglesi.
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
“The Hound of Heaven”, the greatest religious poem of modern times and one of the greatest of all times, was produced under certain peculiar historical conditions, which accentuate its isolation. To begin with, the religious poem is a religious poem, not only in what we should call the real sense, but in what some would call the limited sense. The word “religion” is used in these days in an expansive or telescopic fashion, sometimes inevitable, sometimes nearly intolerable. It is used of various realms of emotion or spiritual speculation more or less lying on the borders of religion itself; it is applied to other things that have nothing to do with religion; it is applied to some things that are almost identical with irreligion. But the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean or can be made to mean we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts. For the latter it will be enough to realise that there certainly was and is a certain thing, to which our fathers found it more practical to attach and limit the name of religion; that they recognised that the thing had many forms, and that there were many religions; but that they were equally certain of what things were not religions, including much that modern moralists call a wider religious life. They recognised a Protestant religion and a Catholic religion, and probably thought one or other of them true; they recognised a Mohammedan religion, even if they thought it false; they recognised a Jewish religion, which had once been true and by a sort of treason had become false; and so on. But they did not recognise a religion of Humanity; or a “religion of the Life Force”: or a religion of creative evolution; or a religion which has the object of ultimately producing a god who does not yet exist. And the distinction is better preserved by noting these examples than by an attempt to fix the elusive evasions of the verbal sophists of today.
What we mean when we say that “The Hound of Heaven” is a real religious poem is simply that it would make no sense if we supposed it to refer to any of these modern abstractions, or to anything but a personal Creator in relation to a personal creature. It may be, and indeed is, a generous and charitable mood to look out on all the multitudes of men with sympathy and social loyalty. But it was not the multitudes of men that were pursuing the hero of this poem “down the nights and down the days”. It may be a good thing for men to look forward to mankind someday producing a superior being, thousands of years hence, who will be like a god compared with the common mass of men. But it was not some superior person born a thousand years hence, who drove the sinner in this story from refuge to refuge. He was not running away from the Life Force, from a mere summary of all natural vitality, which would be expressed equally in the pursued or the pursuer. For it requires quite as much Life Force to run away from anybody as to run after anybody. He was not swiftly escaping from a slow adaptive process called evolution, like a man pursued by a snail. He was not alarmed at a gradual biological transformation, by which a Hound of Heaven might be evolved out of a Hound of Hell. He was dealing with the direct individual relations of God and Man, and the story would be absolutely senseless to anybody who thought that the service of Man is a substitute for the service of God. This is where the practical habit of speech, among our religious ancestors of all religions, proves its validity and veracity. Francis Thompson was a Catholic, and a very Catholic Catholic. In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the solid central fact of the subject or subject-matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even from pagans; and all Christians have their part in him. A perfectly simple and straightforward member of the Salvation Army knows what “The Hound of Heaven” is about, even if he knows it better without reading it, and would recognise its central theology as promptly as the Pope. But the mere humanist, the mere humanitarian, the universal aesthete, the patroniser of all religions, he will never know what it is about, for he has never been near enough to God to run away from Him.
Now the next point of interest is that this poem of purely personal religion, so directly devotional, so dogmatically orthodox, appeared at a time when it might least be expected, and at the end of an historical process that might have seemed to make it impossible. The nineteenth century had been, at least on the surface, one triumphal procession of progress, away from these theological relations, which were accounted narrow, towards ideals of brotherhood or natural living which seemed to be more and more broad. We might say that the poets had led the procession, for even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Shelley and Landor and Byron and Keats had moved in various ways towards a pantheistic paganism; and the tendency was continued by Victor Hugo in Europe and by Walt Whitman in America. There were, of course, continual cross-currents and confusions. Even an appeal to pantheism is something like an appeal to theism, and it was difficult to imitate the pagans without discovering, like St. Paul, that they were very religious. The contradiction came out quaintly in the case of Swinburne, who was always trying to prove that he was an atheist by invoking about ten different gods in a style exactly copied from the Old Testament.
Roughly speaking, however, I myself remember fairly well the curious cultural conditions in which the genius of Francis Thompson arose; for, though I was a boy at the time, a boy can sometimes absorb the atmosphere of a society, with the same subtle subconscious instinct with which a child can absorb the atmosphere of a house. I read all the minor poets; and it was specially an age of minor poets. The curious thing is that Francis Thompson was considered, criticised, appreciated or admired as one of the minor poets. I can remember Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, who is one of the survivors of that epoch, defending himself with spirit, but with a certain air of audacity, against the charge of fulsome exaggeration in saying that there was in the poems of this Mr. Thompson an Elizabethan richness and sometimes almost a Shakespearian splendour. Mr. Le Gallienne was quite right; but the main point is that his defence was a general defence of minor poets, and of this poet as a minor poet. It had hardly occurred to the world in general that Francis Thompson was a major poet; we might almost say a major prophet. There was in all that world of culture an atmosphere of paganism that had worn rather thin. But hardly anybody thought that the future of poetry could be anything but a future of paganism. It was then, in the slowly deepening silence, as in the poem of Coventry Patmore, that there was first heard, afar off, the baying of a hound.
That is the primary point about the work of Francis Thompson; even before its many-coloured pageant of images and words. The awakening of the domini canes, the Dogs of God, meant that the hunt was up once more; the hunt for the souls of men; and that religion of that realistic sort was anything but dead. In Patmore’s poem the dog is “an old guard-hound”; and we may say, without irreverence, that the first impression or lesson was that there is life in the old dog yet. In any case, it was an event of history, as much as an event of literature, when personal religion returned suddenly with something of the power of Dante or the Dies Irae, after a century in which such religion had seemed to grow more weak and provincial, and more and more impersonal religions appeared to possess the future. And those who best understand the world know that the world is changed, and that the hunt will continue until the world turns to bay.
IL SEGUGIO DEL CIELO
«The Hound of Heaven», la più grande poesia religiosa dei tempi moderni e una delle più grandi di ogni tempo, nacque in certe peculiari condizioni storiche, che ne accentuano l’isolamento. Anzitutto, la poesia religiosa è una poesia religiosa non soltanto in quello che diremmo il senso reale, ma in quello che alcuni chiamerebbero il senso ristretto. La parola «religione» è usata, di questi tempi, in modo dilatato e telescopico, talora inevitabile, talora quasi intollerabile. La si applica a svariati regni dell’emozione o della speculazione spirituale che stanno più o meno sui confini della religione stessa; la si applica ad altre cose che non hanno nulla a che fare con la religione; la si applica ad alcune cose che sono quasi identiche all’irreligione. Ma la linea che separa la legittima dall’illegittima espansione di una parola è così difficile da tracciare, che poco si guadagna a discuterne, se non quella pura contesa intorno a una parola che si chiama logomachia. Vi sono sempre certe confusioni intorno a una definizione, o eccezioni a una regola. Il grande principio che Porco è Porco non elimina del tutto l’esistenza della ghisa grezza, che in inglese si chiama pig-iron, «ferro-porco», né quella dei cannibali che chiamano un uomo un lungo porco. Tutti conosciamo l’uomo semplice e pratico, lo scettico in mezzo alla folla, l’ateo sulla cassetta di sapone, che si vanta di chiamare vanga una vanga, e in genere la chiama vànega. Ma persino lui potrà trovarsi a fare i conti con l’uomo dotto e raffinato, il quale gli dimostrerà che perfino nel caso dell’asso di picche che sbatte giù sul tavolo giocando a poker, la picca non è affatto una picca; derivando dallo spagnolo espada, ossia spada. Se una volta cominciamo a cavillare e a litigare su ciò che le parole dovrebbero significare o si possono far significare, ci ritroveremo in un puro mondo di parole, quanto mai tedioso per coloro che si occupano di pensieri. A questi ultimi basterà comprendere che vi era certamente, e vi è, una certa cosa, alla quale i nostri padri trovarono più pratico attaccare e limitare il nome di religione; che essi riconoscevano come quella cosa avesse molte forme, e come vi fossero molte religioni; ma erano ugualmente certi di quali cose non fossero religioni, comprese molte che i moralisti moderni chiamano una più ampia vita religiosa. Essi riconoscevano una religione protestante e una religione cattolica, e probabilmente pensavano che l’una o l’altra fosse vera; riconoscevano una religione maomettana, anche se la ritenevano falsa; riconoscevano una religione ebraica, che era stata un tempo vera e per una sorta di tradimento era divenuta falsa; e così via. Ma non riconoscevano una religione dell’Umanità; né una «religione della Forza Vitale»; né una religione dell’evoluzione creatrice; né una religione che abbia per oggetto di produrre in ultimo un dio che ancora non esiste. E la distinzione si conserva meglio annotando questi esempi che tentando di fissare le sfuggenti evasioni dei sofisti verbali d’oggi.
Ciò che intendiamo, quando diciamo che «The Hound of Heaven» è una vera poesia religiosa, è semplicemente che essa non avrebbe alcun senso se supponessimo che si riferisca a una qualsiasi di queste astrazioni moderne, o a qualcosa che non sia un Creatore personale in rapporto con una creatura personale. Può essere, ed è invero, uno stato d’animo generoso e caritatevole guardare a tutte le moltitudini degli uomini con simpatia e lealtà sociale. Ma non erano le moltitudini degli uomini a inseguire l’eroe di questa poesia «giù per le notti e giù per i giorni». Può essere una buona cosa, per gli uomini, guardare al giorno in cui l’umanità produrrà un essere superiore, fra migliaia d’anni, che sarà come un dio a paragone della comune massa degli uomini. Ma non era una qualche persona superiore, nata mille anni più tardi, a cacciare il peccatore di questa storia di rifugio in rifugio. Egli non fuggiva dalla Forza Vitale, da un mero compendio di tutta la vitalità naturale, che si esprimerebbe egualmente nell’inseguito o nell’inseguitore. Poiché occorre altrettanta Forza Vitale per fuggire da qualcuno quanta per corrergli dietro. Egli non sfuggiva rapido a un lento processo adattivo chiamato evoluzione, come un uomo inseguito da una lumaca. Non si allarmava per una graduale trasformazione biologica, mediante la quale un Segugio del Cielo potrebbe evolversi da un Segugio dell’Inferno. Egli aveva a che fare con le dirette relazioni individuali fra Dio e l’Uomo, e la storia risulterebbe assolutamente insensata a chiunque pensasse che il servizio dell’Uomo sia un surrogato del servizio di Dio. È qui che l’abitudine pratica del linguaggio, presso i nostri antenati religiosi di tutte le religioni, dimostra la sua validità e la sua veracità. Francis Thompson era cattolico, e un cattolico molto cattolico. In certi aspetti dell’arte, della poesia e della pompa, il cattolico è più affine al pagano; in certi aspetti della filosofia e della logica (benché ciò sia poco compreso), egli ha maggiore simpatia con lo scettico o l’agnostico. Ma nel solido fatto centrale del soggetto o della materia trattata egli è pur sempre qualcosa di assolutamente distinto dagli scettici e persino dai pagani; e tutti i cristiani hanno parte in lui. Un membro perfettamente semplice e schietto dell’Esercito della Salvezza sa di che cosa parli «The Hound of Heaven», anche se lo sa meglio senza averla letta, e ne riconoscerebbe la teologia centrale con la stessa prontezza del Papa. Ma il puro umanista, il puro umanitario, l’esteta universale, il protettore di tutte le religioni, costui non saprà mai di che cosa essa parli, poiché non è mai stato abbastanza vicino a Dio da fuggire da Lui.
Ora, il punto d’interesse successivo è che questa poesia di religione puramente personale, così direttamente devota, così dogmaticamente ortodossa, apparve in un tempo in cui meno ci si sarebbe potuti aspettarla, e al termine di un processo storico che avrebbe potuto sembrare renderla impossibile. Il diciannovesimo secolo era stato, almeno in superficie, un solo trionfale corteo di progresso, lontano da quelle relazioni teologiche, che si giudicavano anguste, verso ideali di fratellanza o di vita naturale che parevano sempre più ampi. Potremmo dire che i poeti avevano guidato il corteo, giacché fin dal principio del diciannovesimo secolo Shelley e Landor e Byron e Keats si erano mossi in vari modi verso un paganesimo panteistico; e la tendenza fu proseguita da Victor Hugo in Europa e da Walt Whitman in America. Vi erano, naturalmente, continue correnti contrarie e confusioni. Persino un appello al panteismo è qualcosa di simile a un appello al teismo, ed era difficile imitare i pagani senza scoprire, come san Paolo, che essi erano molto religiosi. La contraddizione emergeva in modo bizzarro nel caso di Swinburne, che tentava sempre di provare d’essere ateo invocando una decina di dèi diversi in uno stile esattamente ricalcato dall’Antico Testamento.
A grandi linee, tuttavia, io stesso ricordo abbastanza bene le curiose condizioni culturali in cui sorse il genio di Francis Thompson; poiché, sebbene fossi un ragazzo a quel tempo, un ragazzo può talvolta assorbire l’atmosfera di una società, con lo stesso sottile istinto subconscio con cui un bambino può assorbire l’atmosfera di una casa. Leggevo tutti i poeti minori; ed era proprio un’età di poeti minori. La cosa curiosa è che Francis Thompson veniva considerato, criticato, apprezzato o ammirato come uno dei poeti minori. Ricordo il signor Richard Le Gallienne, che è uno dei superstiti di quell’epoca, difendersi con brio, ma con una certa aria d’audacia, contro l’accusa di esagerazione sdolcinata per aver detto che nelle poesie di questo signor Thompson vi era una ricchezza elisabettiana e talvolta quasi uno splendore shakespeariano. Il signor Le Gallienne aveva perfettamente ragione; ma il punto principale è che la sua difesa era una difesa generale dei poeti minori, e di questo poeta come poeta minore. A malapena era venuto in mente al mondo in generale che Francis Thompson fosse un poeta maggiore; potremmo quasi dire un profeta maggiore. Vi era, in tutto quel mondo di cultura, un’atmosfera di paganesimo che si era piuttosto logorata. Ma quasi nessuno pensava che l’avvenire della poesia potesse essere qualcosa di diverso da un avvenire di paganesimo. Fu allora, nel silenzio che lentamente si faceva più profondo, come nella poesia di Coventry Patmore, che si udì per la prima volta, lontano lontano, il latrato di un segugio.
Questo è il punto primario riguardo all’opera di Francis Thompson; ancor prima della sua sfilata multicolore d’immagini e di parole. Il risveglio dei domini canes, i Cani di Dio, significava che la caccia era ricominciata; la caccia alle anime degli uomini; e che la religione di quella specie realistica era tutt’altro che morta. Nella poesia di Patmore il cane è «un vecchio cane da guardia»; e possiamo dire, senza irriverenza, che la prima impressione, o lezione, fu che c’è ancora vita nel vecchio cane. In ogni caso, fu un evento della storia, non meno che un evento della letteratura, quando la religione personale ritornò all’improvviso con qualcosa della potenza di Dante o del Dies Irae, dopo un secolo in cui tale religione era parsa farsi sempre più debole e provinciale, e religioni sempre più impersonali parevano possedere l’avvenire. E coloro che meglio comprendono il mondo sanno che il mondo è mutato, e che la caccia continuerà finché il mondo non si volterà, spinto alle strette, ad affrontare la muta.
THE FRIVOLOUS MAN
By one of those queer associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious. Even those whom we commonly regard as belonging to the butterfly classes of society really enjoy themselves most at the crises of their lives which are potentially tragic. Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things. In order to enjoy even a pas de quatre at a subscription dance a man must feel for the moment that the stars are dancing to the same tune. In the old religions of the world, indeed, people did think that the stars were dancing to the tunes of their temples; and they danced as no man has danced since. But thorough enjoyment, enjoyment that has no hesitation, no incidental blight, no arrière pensée, is only possible to the serious man. Wine, says the Scripture, maketh glad the heart of man, but only of the man who has a heart. And so also the thing called good spirits is possible only to the spiritual.
The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that be is a pessimist. The idea of the gay and thoughtless man of fashion, intoxicated with pagan delights, is a figment invented entirely by religious people who never met any such man in their lives. The man of pleasure is one of the fables of the pious. Puritans have given a great deal too much credit to the power which the world has to satisfy the soul; in admitting that the sinner is gay and careless they have given away the strongest part of their case. As a matter of fact, Puritanism commonly falls into the error of accusing the frivolous man of all the wrong vices. For instance, it says (and it is a favourite phrase) that the frivolous man is “careless”. In truth the frivolous man is very careful. Not only does he spend hours over dressing and similar technical matters, but a great part of his life is passed in criticising and discussing similar technical matters. At any odd hour of the day we may find him talking about whether one man has the right kind of coat or another man the wrong kind of dinner-service; and about these matters he is far more solemn than a Pope or a General Council. His general air about them might be described as rather sad than serious, as rather hopeless than severe. Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.
Frivolity has nothing to do with happiness. It plays upon the surface of things, and the surface is almost always rough and uneven. The frivolous person is the person who cannot fully appreciate the weight and value of anything. In practice he does not appreciate even the weight and value of the things commonly counted frivolous. He does not enjoy his cigars as the gutter boy enjoys his cigarette; he does not enjoy his ballet as the child enjoys “Punch and Judy”. But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus, for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous, statesmen are generally frivolous, conscientious objectors are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fullness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour. The splendid and everlasting definition of real irreverence is to be found in that misunderstood and neglected commandment which declares that the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. This again is supposed vaguely to have some connection with buffoonery and jocularity and play upon words. But surely that is not the plain meaning of the phrase. To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scriptures of Elfland, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it— this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists. The blasphemer is, indeed, fundamentally natural and prosaic, for he speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be commonplace. But the ordinary preacher and religious orator speaks in a commonplace manner about that which he believes to be divine.
This is the breach of one of the Commandments; it is the sin against the name. Take, if you will, the name wildly, take it jestingly, take it brutally and angrily, take it childishly, take it wrongly; but do not take it in vain. Use a sanctity for some strange or new purpose and justify that use; use a sanctity for some doubtful and experimental purpose and stake your act on your success; use a sanctity for some base and hateful purpose and abide the end. But do not use a sanctity for no purpose at all; do not talk about Christ when you might as well talk about Mr. Perks; do not use patriotism and honour and the Communion of Saints as stopgaps in a halting speech. This is the sin of frivolity, and it is the chief characteristic of the great majority of the conventionally religious class.
Thus we come back to the conclusion that real seriousness is at a discount alike among the irreligious and the religious, alike in the worldly and in the unworldly world.
L’UOMO FRIVOLO
Per una di quelle bizzarre associazioni che nessuno riesce mai a comprendere, un gran numero di persone è giunto a credere che la frivolezza abbia una qualche connessione con il godimento. In verità, nessuno può realmente godere di sé se non è serio. Perfino coloro che siamo soliti considerare appartenenti alle classi effimere della società godono davvero di sé soprattutto nei momenti critici della loro vita, quelli potenzialmente tragici. Gli uomini possono godere soltanto delle cose fondamentali. Per gustare la più lieve e volatile delle facezie, un uomo deve essere radicato in un qualche senso basilare della bontà delle cose; e la bontà delle cose significa, naturalmente, la serietà delle cose. Per godere anche solo di un pas de quatre a un ballo su sottoscrizione, un uomo deve sentire per un istante che le stelle danzano sullo stesso motivo. Nelle antiche religioni del mondo, in effetti, la gente credeva davvero che le stelle danzassero sui motivi dei loro templi; e danzavano come nessun uomo ha più danzato da allora. Ma il godimento pieno, il godimento che non ha esitazioni, né alcuna ruggine occasionale, né alcun arrière pensée, è possibile soltanto all’uomo serio. Il vino, dice la Scrittura, rallegra il cuore dell’uomo, ma solo dell’uomo che ha un cuore. E così anche ciò che si chiama buonumore è possibile soltanto a chi ha uno spirito.
L’uomo davvero frivolo, l’uomo frivolo di società, tutti lo conosciamo, e chiunque di noi lo conosca davvero sa che, se possiede una caratteristica più spiccata di ogni altra, è quella di essere un pessimista. L’idea dell’uomo di mondo, gaio e sconsiderato, inebriato di delizie pagane, è una finzione inventata di sana pianta da persone religiose che non hanno mai incontrato in vita loro un uomo simile. L’uomo di piacere è una delle favole dei pii. I puritani hanno riconosciuto fin troppo credito al potere che il mondo ha di soddisfare l’anima; ammettendo che il peccatore è gaio e spensierato, hanno ceduto la parte più forte della loro tesi. In verità, il puritanesimo cade comunemente nell’errore di accusare l’uomo frivolo di tutti i vizi sbagliati. Per esempio, dice (ed è una sua frase prediletta) che l’uomo frivolo è «sbadato». In verità l’uomo frivolo è assai attento. Non soltanto trascorre ore a vestirsi e in simili faccende tecniche, ma gran parte della sua vita se ne va nel criticare e discutere di simili faccende tecniche. In qualunque ora spiccia della giornata possiamo sorprenderlo a discutere se un tale abbia la giusta foggia di soprabito o se un altro abbia il servizio da tavola sbagliato; e su queste materie è ben più solenne di un Papa o di un Concilio generale. Il suo contegno complessivo al riguardo si potrebbe definire più triste che serio, più disperato che severo. La religione si potrebbe definire, all’incirca, come il potere che ci rende gioiosi riguardo alle cose che contano. La frivolezza mondana si potrebbe definire, con parallela proprietà, come il potere che ci rende tristi riguardo alle cose che non contano.
La frivolezza non ha nulla a che vedere con la felicità. Gioca sulla superficie delle cose, e la superficie è quasi sempre ruvida e ineguale. La persona frivola è quella che non sa apprezzare appieno il peso e il valore di alcunché. In pratica, non apprezza neppure il peso e il valore delle cose comunemente giudicate frivole. Non gode dei suoi sigari come il monello del rigagnolo gode della sua sigaretta; non gode del suo balletto come il bambino gode di «Punch and Judy». Ma, per rendergli giustizia, bisogna ammettere che non è solo a essere frivolo: altre classi di uomini condividono il biasimo. Così, per esempio, i vescovi sono generalmente frivoli, i maestri di morale sono generalmente frivoli, gli statisti sono generalmente frivoli, gli obiettori di coscienza sono generalmente frivoli. Filosofi e poeti sono spesso frivoli; i politici sono sempre frivoli. Poiché, se la frivolezza significa questa mancanza di presa sulla pienezza e sul valore delle cose, essa deve avere moltissime forme oltre a quella della mera leggerezza e ricerca del piacere. Moltissime persone hanno l’idea fissa che l’irriverenza, per esempio, consista principalmente nel fare battute. Ma è del tutto possibile essere irriverenti con una dizione priva del minimo tocco di sconvenienza, e con un’anima non contaminata da un’ombra di umorismo. La splendida ed eterna definizione della vera irriverenza si trova in quel comandamento frainteso e trascurato che dichiara che il Signore non riterrà innocente colui che pronuncia il Suo nome invano. Anche questo si suppone abbia vagamente una qualche connessione con la buffoneria, la giocosità e i giochi di parole. Ma sicuramente non è questo il senso limpido della frase. Dire una cosa con un tocco di umorismo non è dirla invano. Dire una cosa con un tocco di satira o di critica personale non è dirla invano. Dire una cosa perfino in modo fantastico, come un qualche frammento tratto dalle scritture del Regno degli Elfi, non è dirla invano. Ma dire una cosa con una gravità pomposa e priva di senso; dire una cosa così che risulti a un tempo bigotta e vaga; dire una cosa così che risulti indistinta nel momento stesso in cui è letterale; dire una cosa così che l’ascoltatore più compìto, al termine, non sappia davvero per quale ragione al mondo tu avresti dovuto dirla o lui avrebbe dovuto ascoltarla: questo è veramente, e nel senso grave di quelle antiche parole mosaiche, pronunciare quella cosa invano. Il Nome è pronunciato invano assai più spesso dai predicatori che dai laicisti. Il bestemmiatore, in effetti, è fondamentalmente naturale e prosaico, poiché parla in maniera banale di ciò che crede sia banale. Ma il predicatore ordinario e l’oratore religioso parlano in maniera banale di ciò che credono sia divino.
Questa è la violazione di uno dei Comandamenti; è il peccato contro il nome. Prendi, se vuoi, il nome selvaggiamente, prendilo per scherzo, prendilo brutalmente e con collera, prendilo puerilmente, prendilo a torto; ma non prenderlo invano. Usa una cosa sacra per qualche strano o nuovo fine e giustifica quell’uso; usa una cosa sacra per qualche fine dubbio e sperimentale e gioca la tua azione sul tuo successo; usa una cosa sacra per qualche fine vile e odioso e attendine l’esito. Ma non usare una cosa sacra per nessun fine; non parlare di Cristo quando potresti altrettanto bene parlare del signor Perks; non usare il patriottismo e l’onore e la Comunione dei Santi come tappabuchi in un discorso claudicante. Questo è il peccato della frivolezza, ed è la caratteristica principale della grande maggioranza della classe convenzionalmente religiosa.
Così torniamo alla conclusione che la vera serietà è tenuta in poco conto tanto tra gli irreligiosi quanto tra i religiosi, tanto nel mondo mondano quanto in quello ultramondano.
TWO STUBBORN PIECES OF IRON
In discussing such a proposal as that of the co-education of the sexes it is very desirable first of all to realise clearly what it is that we want the thing to do. The thing might be upheld for quite opposite reasons. It might be supposed to increase delicacy or to decrease it. It might be valued because it was a sphere for sentiment or because it was a damper for sentiment. My sympathies would move me in a discussion entirely according to what difference its upholders thought it would make. For myself, I doubt whether it would make much difference at all. Everyone must agree with co-education for very young children; and I cannot believe that even for elder children it would do any great harm. But that is because I think the school is not so important as people think it nowadays. The home is the really important thing, and always will be. People talk about the poor neglecting their children; but a little boy in the street has more traces of having been brought up by his mother than of having been taught ethics and geography by a pupil teacher. And if we take this true parallel of the home we can see, I think, exactly what co-education can do and what it cannot do. The school will never make boys and girls ordinary comrades. The home does not make them that. The sexes can work together in a school-room just as they can breakfast together in a breakfast-room; but neither makes any difference to the fact that the boys go off to a boyish companionship which the girls would think disgusting, while the girls go off to a girl companionship which the boys would think literally insane. Co-educate as much as you like, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down. Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexless camaraderie. It will be a place where boys go about in fives sulkily growling at the girls, and where the girls go about in twos turning up their noses at the boys.
Now if you accept this state of things and are content with it as the result of your co-education, I am with you; I accept it as one of the mystical first facts of Nature. I accept it somewhat in the spirit of Carlyle when somebody told him that Harriet Martineau had “accepted the Universe”, and he said, “By God, she’d better.” But if you have any idea that co-education would do more than parade the sexes in front of each other twice a day, if you think it would destroy their deep ignorance of each other or start them on a basis of rational understanding, then I say first that this will never happen, and second that I (for one) should be horribly annoyed if it did.
I can reach my meaning best by another route. Very few people ever state properly the strong argument in favour of marrying for love or against marrying for money. The argument is not that all lovers are heroes and heroines, nor is it that all dukes are profligates or all millionaires cads. The argument is this, that the differences between a man and a woman are at the best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest. To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of “Beauty and the Beast”. Every man has to find out that his wife is cross—that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else’s sanity.
This is not a digression. The whole value of the normal relations of man and woman lies in the fact that they first begin really to criticise each other when they first begin really to admire each other. And a good thing, too. I say, with a full sense of the responsibility of the statement, that it is better that the sexes should misunderstand each other until they marry. It is better that they should not have the knowledge until they have the reverence and the charity. We want no premature and puppyish “knowing all about girls”. We do not want the highest mysteries of a Divine distinction to be understood before they are desired, and handled before they are understood. That which Mr. Shaw calls the Life Force, but for which Christianity has more philosophical terms, has created this early division of tastes and habits for that romantic purpose, which is also the most practical of all purposes. Those whom God has sundered, shall no man join.
It is, therefore, a question of what are really the co-educators’ aims. If they have small aims, some convenience in organisation, some slight improvement in manners, they know more about such things than I. But if they have large aims, I am against them.
DUE OSTINATI PEZZI DI FERRO
Nel discutere una proposta come quella della co-educazione dei sessi è assai opportuno, prima di ogni altra cosa, rendersi ben conto di che cosa vogliamo che essa faccia. La cosa potrebbe essere sostenuta per ragioni del tutto opposte. La si potrebbe supporre atta ad accrescere la delicatezza oppure a diminuirla. La si potrebbe apprezzare perché offre una sfera al sentimento, oppure perché ne è un freno. In una discussione le mie simpatie si muoverebbero interamente a seconda di quale differenza i suoi sostenitori pensassero che essa produca. Quanto a me, dubito che produrrebbe una gran differenza. Tutti devono convenire sulla co-educazione per i bambini piccolissimi; e non riesco a credere che, anche per i più grandi, essa arrecherebbe gran danno. Ma ciò dipende dal fatto che ritengo la scuola meno importante di quanto la gente creda oggigiorno. La casa è la cosa davvero importante, e sempre lo sarà. Si parla dei poveri che trascurano i loro figli; ma un bambino di strada porta più tracce di essere stato allevato da sua madre che non di aver ricevuto lezioni di etica e di geografia da un aiuto-maestro. E se prendiamo questo verace parallelo della casa possiamo vedere, credo, esattamente ciò che la co-educazione può fare e ciò che non può fare. La scuola non farà mai di ragazzi e ragazze dei comuni compagni. La casa non li rende tali. I sessi possono lavorare insieme in un’aula proprio come possono far colazione insieme in una sala da pranzo; ma né l’una né l’altra cosa muta minimamente il fatto che i ragazzi se ne vanno verso una compagnia da ragazzi che le ragazze giudicherebbero disgustosa, mentre le ragazze se ne vanno verso una compagnia da ragazze che i ragazzi giudicherebbero letteralmente folle. Co-educate quanto vi pare: ci sarà sempre un muro tra i sessi finché l’amore o la concupiscenza non lo abbatterà. Il vostro campo giochi co-educativo per allievi adolescenti non sarà un luogo di cameratismo asessuato. Sarà un luogo dove i ragazzi vanno in giro a cinque a cinque ringhiando torvi contro le ragazze, e dove le ragazze vanno in giro a due a due arricciando il naso davanti ai ragazzi.
Ora, se accettate questo stato di cose e ve ne accontentate come del risultato della vostra co-educazione, sono con voi; lo accetto come uno dei mistici fatti primi della Natura. Lo accetto un po’ nello spirito di Carlyle quando qualcuno gli disse che Harriet Martineau aveva «accettato l’Universo», ed egli rispose: «Per Dio, ha fatto bene». Ma se avete qualche idea che la co-educazione possa fare di più che sfilare i due sessi l’uno dinanzi all’altro due volte al giorno, se pensate che essa distruggerebbe la loro profonda reciproca ignoranza o li avvierebbe su una base di razionale comprensione, allora dico anzitutto che ciò non accadrà mai, e in secondo luogo che io (per parte mia) ne sarei orribilmente seccato se accadesse.
Posso giungere al mio significato meglio per un’altra via. Pochissimi sanno esporre come si deve l’argomento forte in favore del matrimonio per amore o contro il matrimonio per denaro. L’argomento non è che tutti gli innamorati siano eroi ed eroine, né che tutti i duchi siano libertini o tutti i milionari canaglie. L’argomento è questo: che le differenze tra un uomo e una donna sono, nella migliore delle ipotesi, così ostinate ed esasperanti da non potersi praticamente superare se non vi è un’atmosfera di esagerata tenerezza e di reciproco interesse. Per mettere la cosa in una sola metafora, i sessi sono due ostinati pezzi di ferro; se si vogliono saldare insieme, bisogna farlo mentre sono arroventati. Ogni donna deve scoprire che suo marito è una bestia egoista, perché ogni uomo è una bestia egoista secondo il metro di una donna. Ma che ella scopra la bestia mentre entrambi sono ancora dentro la favola de «La Bella e la Bestia». Ogni uomo deve scoprire che sua moglie è permalosa—vale a dire, sensibile fino alla follia: giacché ogni donna è folle secondo il metro maschile. Ma che egli scopra che è folle mentre la sua follia è più degna di considerazione che non la assennatezza di chiunque altro.
Questa non è una digressione. Tutto il valore delle normali relazioni tra uomo e donna sta nel fatto che essi cominciano davvero a criticarsi l’un l’altro proprio quando cominciano davvero ad ammirarsi l’un l’altro. E meno male. Dico, con la piena coscienza della responsabilità dell’affermazione, che è meglio che i sessi si fraintendano finché non si sposano. È meglio che non abbiano la conoscenza finché non abbiano la reverenza e la carità. Non vogliamo alcun precoce e cagnesco «sapere tutto sulle ragazze». Non vogliamo che i più alti misteri di una distinzione divina siano compresi prima di essere desiderati, e maneggiati prima di essere compresi. Ciò che il signor Shaw chiama la Forza Vitale, ma per cui il Cristianesimo ha termini più filosofici, ha creato questa precoce divisione di gusti e di abitudini per quel fine romantico, che è anche il più pratico di tutti i fini. Coloro che Dio ha separato, nessun uomo li congiunga.
Si tratta dunque di stabilire quali siano realmente gli scopi dei co-educatori. Se hanno scopi modesti, qualche comodità nell’organizzazione, qualche lieve miglioramento nelle maniere, essi ne sanno più di me su tali cose. Ma se hanno scopi grandi, sono contro di loro.
HENRY JAMES
An artist who is at once individual and complete attracts a type of praise which is a sort of disparagement; and even those who overrate him underrate him. For the tendency is always to insist on his art; and by art is often meant merely arrangement. Because a very few colours can be harmoniously arranged in a picture, it is implied that he has not many colours on his palette. And as a study by Henry James was often in its tones something of a nocturne in grey and silver, even his eulogists managed to imply something slight or even thin about his work. Before attempting to touch upon what was really peculiar in the tone of it, it is necessary to correct, and even to contradict, this tenuous impression by the reminder of what he had in common with other great writers. For Henry James must be considered as a great man of letters; and the greatness itself is something which existed in geniuses utterly unlike him. It might seem startling and even comic to compare him to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great, and what alone can make a literary man in the ultimate sense great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas. It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric with one really perfect image; but when we open any play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great man. We are taking at random from a whole store of what are truly to be called great inventions when we think of Mrs. Todgers’ wooden leg, or Mr. Fledgby’s nose, or Mr. Pecksniff’s pinions, or Mr. Swiveller’s double-bedded room.
And wide as the distance may seem, it is true, in exactly the same sense, that we are taking at random from a treasury of unique inventions when we think of any two or three of the numberless new ideas of Henry James; of the two people who grew afraid of the mystical coincidence of never meeting; of the man who ceased to exist when he was left alone; of the mysterious unity that ran through all a writer’s books like “the figure in the carpet”; of the pearls that were counted false for purposes of respectability and real for purposes of sale; of the sudden supernatural calm created like a garden in the skies by the breakdown of the brain at its busiest; of the wife who would not justify herself to her husband because his whole life was in his chivalry; and so on through a thousand more. Such an idea, though it may be as delicate as an atmosphere, is nevertheless as precise as a pun. It cannot be a coincidence; it is always a creation. He has been attacked for making a great deal of small things; but most of those who attacked him were making a great deal of large nothings. The point that is important about him is not whether the things with which he dealt were as small as some think them, or as large as he could make them; whether it was a fine shade in vulgarity or an occult tenacity of vice; whether it was the restless ten minutes of a visitor coming too early, or the restless ten years of a lover moved too late. The point is that the things were things; that we should have lost them if he had not given them; that no mere perfections of prose would have been a substitute for them; in short, that he never wrote about nothing. Each small notion had the serious thing called value— like a jewel, or, like what is both smaller and more valuable than a jewel, a seed.
His greatness is the greatest thing about him, therefore, and it is of a kind with that of other creative men. But when this large and rather neglected aspect has first been allowed for, it is possible to consider him as a peculiar and fastidious writer. Certainly his work is of a sort to which it is difficult to do justice amid the pulsation of the direct public energies with which most of us who are at all public-spirited feel ourselves concerned today. We should need to be at leisure in those large and vague spaces of gardens and great neglected houses which are the background of so many of his spiritual dramas, to grow fond of the fine shades of a whole science of shadows and slowly appreciate the multitudinous colours of what seems at first monochrome. Some of his finest stories were ghost stories; and one must be alone to meet a ghost. And yet even the phrase I use indicates its own limitations, for no one seized more swiftly than Henry James the greatness of this awful time, in which we have to think even of ghosts in crowds. He had always been in his innermost being a mystic, and the dead were near to him; and he rose more magnificently, perhaps, than any other to that hour in which the dead were so living and so near to us all. A unique purity and disinterestedness had always attended his pen, and he had the reward of it in realising moral proportion. He had never failed to see small things; nor did he fall into the more modern and enlightened error of failing to see big ones. He had no difficulty in adjusting his subtlety to the stupendous simplicity of a war for justice; his brain, like a Nasmyth hammer, had not unlearnt in a long course of tapping how to fall and shatter.
That he should feel the prodigy of the Prussian insult to mankind will only surprise those who have read him superficially; or perhaps only read his more superficial sketches. He by no means exhibits manners as more than morals; though he may exhibit manners as more than many would think them. In a story like The Turn of the Screw he has rather the character of a divine detective. The woman who probes the stagnant secret of the depraved boy and girl is resolved to forgive and, therefore, unable to forget. She is a kind of inquisitor; and her morality is altogether of the old thorough and theological sort. It is a summons to repent and die, rather than a vague capacity to die and repent. And when at the last the deliverance of the boy’s soul seems to be delayed by the appearance at the window of his evil genius, “the white face of the damned”, it is perhaps the one place in all modern literature where that monosyllable is not a joke. And it is strongly significant that men of any belief and no belief have universally fallen back on such phraseology to find terms for the sneering savagery of the present enemy of Christendom. Honest grey-haired atheists are found judging the Prussian upon the paradoxical principle that there may be heaven, there must be hell. And the nations can find nothing but the language of demonology to describe a certain poison of pride, which is none the less a tyranny because it is also a temptation.
Henry James always stood, if ever a man did, for civilisation; for that ordered life in which it is possible to tolerate and to understand. His whole world is made out of sympathy; out of a whole network of sympathies. It is a world of wireless telegraphy for the soul; of a psychological brotherhood of men of which the communications could not be cut. Sometimes this sympathy is almost more terrible than antipathy; and his very delicacies produce a sort of promiscuity of minds. Silence becomes a rending revelation. Short spaces or short speeches become overweighted with the awful worth of human life. Minute unto minute uttereth speech, and instant unto instant showeth knowledge. It is only when we have realised how perfect is the poise of such great human art that we can also realise its peril, and know that any outer thing which cannot make it must of necessity destroy it.
It has been customary to talk of Henry James’s American origin as something almost antagonistic to the grace and rarity of his art. I am far from sure that this is not to miss a fine and serious strain in it. There is an element of idealism in the American tradition, which is very well typified in the sincere and sometimes exaggerated external deference to women. This particular sort of purity in the perceptions, very marked in him, he had originally owed, I think, to something other than the more mellow and matured European life in which he came afterwards to take his deepest pleasures. The older civilisation gave him the wonderful things he wanted; but the wonder was his own. His attitude in private life remains for anyone who has seen it as something infinitely higher than politeness; an attitude towards things, and something that can only be called an impersonal reverence. Despite all their modernism, some of his love stories have a dignity that might be dressed in the clothes of an antique time. They should have moved upon high-terraced lawns among great and gentle ladies, and their squires who were something more than gentlemen. As Mr. Yeats says somewhere:
There have been lovers whose thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy, That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books.
The books of Henry James will always be beautiful; and I believe they are young enough to be old.
HENRY JAMES
Un artista che sia insieme personale e compiuto attira un tipo di lode che è quasi un modo di sminuirlo; e persino coloro che lo sopravvalutano finiscono per sottovalutarlo. Ché la tendenza è sempre quella d’insistere sulla sua arte; e per arte s’intende spesso null’altro che disposizione. Poiché in un quadro pochissimi colori possono essere armoniosamente disposti, se ne inferisce ch’egli non abbia molti colori sulla tavolozza. E siccome uno studio di Henry James era spesso, nei suoi toni, qualcosa come un notturno in grigio e argento, perfino i suoi panegiristi riuscivano a insinuare nella sua opera qualcosa di esile o addirittura di tenue. Prima di tentare di sfiorare ciò che di veramente peculiare vi era in quel tono, è necessario correggere, e persino smentire, questa fievole impressione ricordando ciò ch’egli aveva in comune con altri grandi scrittori. Ché Henry James va considerato un grande uomo di lettere; e la grandezza stessa è cosa che esisté in geni del tutto dissimili da lui. Potrà sembrare sorprendente e persino comico paragonarlo a Dickens o addirittura a Shakespeare; ma ciò che lo rende grande è ciò che rende grandi loro, ed è ciò che solo può rendere grande, nel senso ultimo, un uomo di lettere. Sono le idee; la potenza di generare e di rendere vivida un’incessante produzione di idee. È falso dire che ciò che conta è la qualità e non la quantità. Quasi tutti gli uomini hanno fatto una buona battuta nella loro vita; ma fare battute come le faceva Dickens significa essere un grand’uomo. Molti poeti dimenticati hanno lasciato cadere una lirica con una sola immagine davvero perfetta; ma quando apriamo un dramma qualunque di Shakespeare, bello o brutto, a una pagina qualsiasi, importante o no, con la pratica certezza di trovarvi qualche immagine che almeno arresta l’occhio e probabilmente arricchisce la memoria, riponiamo la nostra fiducia in un grand’uomo. Attingiamo a caso da un intero tesoro di ciò che meritano davvero il nome di grandi invenzioni quando pensiamo alla gamba di legno della signora Todgers, o al naso del signor Fledgby, o alle ali del signor Pecksniff, o alla stanza dal doppio letto del signor Swiveller.
E per quanto ampia possa parere la distanza, è vero, esattamente nel medesimo senso, che attingiamo a caso da un tesoro di invenzioni uniche quando pensiamo a due o tre soltanto delle innumerevoli idee nuove di Henry James; ai due esseri che presero a temere la mistica coincidenza di non incontrarsi mai; all’uomo che cessava di esistere quando lo si lasciava solo; alla misteriosa unità che percorreva tutti i libri di uno scrittore come «la figura nel tappeto»; alle perle che si dichiaravano false per ragioni di rispettabilità e vere per ragioni di vendita; all’improvvisa calma soprannaturale creata come un giardino nei cieli dal crollo del cervello nel suo momento più affaccendato; alla moglie che non voleva giustificarsi al marito perché tutta la vita di lui era nella sua cavalleria; e così via, per mille altre ancora. Una simile idea, per quanto possa essere delicata come un’atmosfera, è nondimeno precisa come un bisticcio di parole. Non può essere una coincidenza; è sempre una creazione. Lo si è attaccato per aver fatto gran conto di piccole cose; ma la maggior parte di coloro che lo attaccavano faceva gran conto di grandi nullità. Ciò che di lui importa non è se le cose di cui trattava fossero piccole come alcuni le credono, o grandi come egli sapeva renderle; se si trattasse d’una sottile sfumatura di volgarità o d’un’occulta tenacia del vizio; se fossero i dieci minuti inquieti d’un ospite giunto troppo presto, o i dieci anni inquieti d’un amante mossosi troppo tardi. Il punto è che le cose erano cose; che le avremmo perdute se egli non ce le avesse date; che nessuna mera perfezione di prosa avrebbe potuto surrogarle; in breve, ch’egli non scrisse mai intorno al nulla. Ogni piccola nozione possedeva quella cosa seria che si chiama valore — come un gioiello, o, come ciò che è insieme più piccolo e più prezioso d’un gioiello, un seme.
La sua grandezza è dunque la cosa più grande che sia in lui, ed è dello stesso genere di quella di altri uomini creativi. Ma una volta che si sia tenuto conto di questo aspetto ampio e piuttosto trascurato, è possibile considerarlo come uno scrittore peculiare e schizzinoso. Certo la sua opera è di quella sorta cui è difficile rendere giustizia tra il pulsare delle immediate energie pubbliche che oggi occupano quasi tutti noi che pure abbiamo un qualche senso civico. Ci occorrerebbe l’agio di quegli spazi ampi e vaghi di giardini e di grandi case trascurate che fanno da sfondo a tanti dei suoi drammi spirituali, per affezionarci alle sottili sfumature d’un’intera scienza delle ombre e apprezzare lentamente i molteplici colori di ciò che a prima vista pare monocromo. Alcuni dei suoi racconti più belli erano racconti di fantasmi; e bisogna essere soli per incontrare un fantasma. Eppure la frase stessa che uso ne indica i limiti, ché nessuno colse più prontamente di Henry James la grandezza di questo tempo tremendo, in cui ci tocca pensare persino ai fantasmi in folla. Egli era sempre stato, nel suo essere più intimo, un mistico, e i morti gli erano vicini; e si levò più magnificamente, forse, d’ogni altro, all’altezza di quell’ora in cui i morti furono così vivi e così vicini a tutti noi. Una purezza e un disinteresse unici avevano sempre accompagnato la sua penna, ed egli ne ebbe il premio nel cogliere la proporzione morale. Non aveva mai mancato di vedere le piccole cose; né cadde nell’errore più moderno e illuminato di non vedere le grandi. Non ebbe difficoltà ad adattare la propria sottigliezza alla stupenda semplicità d’una guerra per la giustizia; il suo cervello, come un maglio di Nasmyth, non aveva disimparato, in un lungo esercizio di lievi colpi, come abbattersi e frantumare.
Che egli dovesse sentire il prodigio dell’insulto prussiano all’umanità sorprenderà soltanto coloro che lo hanno letto superficialmente; o che forse hanno letto soltanto i suoi bozzetti più superficiali. Egli non presenta affatto le maniere come qualcosa di più della morale; benché possa presentarle come qualcosa di più di quanto molti le crederebbero. In un racconto come The Turn of the Screw egli ha piuttosto il carattere di un divino investigatore. La donna che sonda lo stagnante segreto del ragazzo e della ragazza depravati è risoluta a perdonare e, perciò, incapace di dimenticare. Ella è una specie d’inquisitore; e la sua moralità è tutta della vecchia specie, rigorosa e teologica. È un’ingiunzione a pentirsi e morire, piuttosto che una vaga facoltà di morire e pentirsi. E quando alla fine la liberazione dell’anima del fanciullo sembra ritardata dall’apparire alla finestra del suo genio malvagio, «il bianco volto del dannato», è forse l’unico luogo in tutta la letteratura moderna in cui quel monosillabo non è uno scherzo. Ed è fortemente significativo che uomini di ogni fede e di nessuna fede siano universalmente ricorsi a una simile fraseologia per trovare parole atte alla ghignante ferocia dell’attuale nemico della Cristianità. Onesti atei dai capelli grigi si scoprono a giudicare il prussiano secondo il principio paradossale che, se forse esiste un paradiso, un inferno deve esistere. E le nazioni non trovano altro che il linguaggio della demonologia per descrivere un certo veleno d’orgoglio, che non è men tirannia per il fatto d’essere anche una tentazione.
Henry James si è sempre schierato, se mai uomo lo fece, dalla parte della civiltà; di quella vita ordinata in cui è possibile tollerare e comprendere. Tutto il suo mondo è fatto di simpatia; d’un’intera rete di simpatie. È un mondo di telegrafia senza fili per l’anima; d’una fratellanza psicologica degli uomini le cui comunicazioni non potrebbero essere recise. Talvolta questa simpatia è quasi più terribile dell’antipatia; e le sue stesse delicatezze producono una sorta di promiscuità degli spiriti. Il silenzio diventa una rivelazione lacerante. Brevi spazi o brevi discorsi si caricano oltremisura del tremendo valore della vita umana. Minuto a minuto proferisce parola, e istante a istante mostra sapienza. Solo quando abbiamo compreso quanto sia perfetto l’equilibrio di una così grande arte umana possiamo anche comprenderne il pericolo, e sapere che qualunque cosa esterna che non sappia crearla dovrà per necessità distruggerla.
È stato consueto parlare dell’origine americana di Henry James come di qualcosa di quasi antagonistico alla grazia e alla rarità della sua arte. Sono ben lungi dall’essere certo che ciò non equivalga a trascurare in essa una vena fine e seria. Vi è un elemento d’idealismo nella tradizione americana, assai bene esemplificato nella sincera e talvolta esagerata deferenza esteriore verso le donne. Questa particolare specie di purezza nelle percezioni, assai marcata in lui, egli l’aveva in origine dovuta, io credo, a qualcosa di diverso dalla più matura e stagionata vita europea in cui venne poi a trarre i suoi più profondi piaceri. La più antica civiltà gli diede le cose meravigliose che desiderava; ma la meraviglia era sua. Il suo atteggiamento nella vita privata resta, per chiunque l’abbia veduto, qualcosa d’infinitamente più alto della cortesia; un atteggiamento verso le cose, e qualcosa che si può soltanto chiamare una riverenza impersonale. Nonostante tutto il loro modernismo, alcune delle sue storie d’amore hanno una dignità che potrebbe vestirsi degli abiti d’un tempo antico. Avrebbero dovuto muoversi su prati dalle alte terrazze, tra dame grandi e gentili, e i loro scudieri che erano qualcosa di più che gentiluomini. Come dice il signor Yeats in qualche luogo:
Vi furono amanti che pensavano l’amore dover essere così composto d’alta cortesia, che sospiravano e citavano con dotti sguardi precedenti tratti da bei vecchi libri.
I libri di Henry James saranno sempre belli; e credo che siano abbastanza giovani da poter essere antichi.
THE STRANGE TALK OF TWO VICTORIANS
The Faith always returns in a counter-attack; and it is generally not only a successful attack but almost always a surprise attack.
Here more than anywhere it is the unexpected that happens; the religion supposed to be rotting away slowly in unlettered peasantries was found present in pressing numbers in the new industrial towns; the creed compassionately tolerated in a few old sentimentalists is today making converts among the young almost entirely of the hard-headed logicians.
But this tendency to a reconciliation with intellectuals, once regarded as a reconciliation with irreconcilables, has produced, among other queer points in the position, this fact; that the newest group consists rather too much of those who are in a position to teach, while there is not yet a sufficient crowd, or larger public, of those who are in a position to learn. There is, for instance, a huge mass of material in Catholic history for very good novels or plays; and there are a considerable proportion of Catholics capable of writing them; but there is not yet a sufficient number of ordinary readers capable of reading them, in the sense of understanding them. This is especially true of the high historic quality of irony.
An Englishman realising the real religious history of his country constantly comes upon small social and political episodes, of which the irony is as grand as Greek tragedy; and then he remembers most of the other Englishmen, and has to own that it would be Greek to them. The very ironic point which gives him grim gratification would be quite pointless, because the public at large would probably take the suggestion quite seriously and never even see the joke.
So, till very lately at least, the public hardly saw the joke of talking about the Virgin Queen or the Glorious Revolution. You cannot have drama without a public; you cannot have irony without an instructed public.
I was wondering the other day whether anybody had thought of a play, or rather a scene, which could be a very fine scene written by anybody well read in eighteenth-century England. It might be called “Five Irishmen.”
Seated round a table in a coffeehouse (but conspicuously not drinking coffee) would be Goldsmith, an old Tory almost a Jacobite; Sheridan, a younger Whig almost a Jacobin; Burke, a Whig more alarmist than any Tory about disturbing the balance of the British Constitution (which he had largely made up out of his own highly imaginative head); Grattan, a Whig orator also, but native to the Irish Parliament; and (if he could be dragged in somehow) somebody more dangerous, like Lord Edward of Tone, foreshadowing the Irish Rebellion. All these men were Protestants. All, either in their own persons or through their families, could be traced back in some way to the time when it seemed that the heart of Ireland was broken; and for a man who did not abandon the Faith there was no normal hope on earth.
I think somebody could make a fine study, in several stages, of how layer after layer began to crack and that awful forbidden ancestral Thing rose slowly to overshadow them like a ghost. They would begin decorously, of course, probably discussing Catholic Emancipation with cold pagan liberality; and the wine and the words and the Irish passion for personal recrimination, and especially for family reminiscence, would bring strange things spouting from the depths; and through a wild scene I actually seemed suddenly to hear the high voice of Sheridan, shrill with intoxication, crying out some taunt: “Have ye forgotten that, O’Bourke?” And then I remembered that an audience in a London theatre would probably make nothing of the notion of that great eternal Thing terribly returning; because any number of them do not know that it is eternal and hardly that it is great.
In Edith Sitwell’s very graceful sketch of Queen Victoria, I came on another quaint little drama, which in this case would be a duologue. Also, in this case, the thing really happened. It is there described briefly and impartially; but anyone knowing persons and period can easily understand and expand it; and to me it is enormously amusing; amusing and also enormous. It has exactly that grim Greek irony of the contrast between great things known and the greater thing that is not known. It was a discussion, and even a dispute between two very eminent Victorians. It was concerned with the news of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
They were both good men; they were both men of the first prominence in the public eye. Both had the finest culture of the Protestant; both had a faint streak of the prig; but both had a warmth of generous conviction for their own favourite causes; neither certainly was a fool; neither was a No-Popery man in the narrow and vulgar sense; both believed themselves flooded with the full daylight of the age of enlightenment and liberty; and, at the same time, both had hobbies and intelligent interests that might soften them toward older religious traditions.
One was a great reader of the Fathers and the first devotional literature; the other had a genuine taste in what was still often regarded as the childish cheap jewellery of medieval painting. One was a High Churchman of the Oxford Movement; the other was a liberal Lutheran. One was the great Gladstone; the other was Albert, the Prince Consort.
The two men talked and disagreed. They sharply disagreed. The point on which they disagreed was extraordinary. But it was not a hundredth part as extraordinary as the part on which they agreed.
Mr. Gladstone was greatly grieved because he had found the Prince Consort in a state of indecent hilarity, he thought, over the news about the Immaculate Conception. Indecent hilarity is not a vice conspicuously staining Prince Albert’s name, any more than Gladstone’s; two more solemn disputants would be hard to find. But Prince Albert was the more cheerful, because (he said in effect) it is always a good thing when an evil system tottering to its fall, does some one wildly insane and frantic act of arrogance; which will quite certainly bring it to a final crash. Rome had staggered along somehow till now; but, obviously, Rome would never have a leg to stand on after this.
But Mr. Gladstone (of the Oxford Movement) could not join in this simple German triumph over the disaster and disgrace that had at last destroyed the Eternal City. In those deep tones of reproach he could command so well, he rebuked the Prince for his insensibility to this blasting and blackening of a name that had meant so much in history; no Christian, he felt, could be insensible to the utter downfall of so large a section of the Christian world. He meant it. He was tremendously upset about it. He returned to the subject afterwards; repeatedly imploring Prince Albert to drop at least one tear upon the ruins of St. Peter’s, now lying as desolate as Stonehenge.
But the Prince also was firm; and remained in his somewhat rare state of high spirits over the news that the unduly protracted business was finished; and the Pope had done himself in at last.
And all this was because—of what? Because one more crown had been added to that tower of crowns that crowd after crowd, city after city, nation after nation, age after age, have reared higher and higher on the image which is of all others most strongly based and founded and built, as regards this earth, in the affection of the universal people. And Prince Albert, with his unselfish labours for the education of the working classes, and Gladstone, with his confident appeal to the great heart of the people, understood so little of what that crown and image really meant to millions of ordinary poor people, in all the countrysides and cities of half the world, that they actually expected that it would be dethroned like a tyranny, for this last toppling insolence in the demands of a tyrant.
The one extraordinary thing on which these extraordinary men agreed, it seems, was that the decision would be unpopular. … One of Belloc’s Ballades had a refrain chiefly remembered by the Envoi, which ran:
Prince, is it true that when you met the Czar You said that English people think it low To coax to life a half-extinct cigar? Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!
Anyhow, the one assumption shared by these admirable public men seems to have been wrong somewhere. Apple-women did not rush madly out of church; seamstresses in garrets did not dash their little images of Mary to the ground, on learning that she was named Immaculate.
Four years after these potentates had their regrettable difference, while the Bishop still frowned and the parish priest feared to believe, little knots of poor peasants began to gather round a strange starved child before a crack in the rocks, from whence was to spring a strange stream and almost a new city; the rocks she had heard resound with a voice crying, “I am the Immaculate Conception… .”
“Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!”
LO STRANO COLLOQUIO DI DUE VITTORIANI
La Fede ritorna sempre con un contrattacco; e per lo più non si tratta soltanto di un attacco vittorioso, ma quasi sempre di un attacco a sorpresa.
Qui più che altrove è l’inatteso che accade; la religione che si supponeva marcire lentamente fra contadinerie illetterate si è trovata presente in numero incalzante nelle nuove città industriali; il credo tollerato con compassione in pochi vecchi sentimentali va oggi facendo proseliti fra i giovani quasi soltanto tra i logici dalla testa dura.
Ma questa tendenza a una riconciliazione con gli intellettuali, un tempo considerata una riconciliazione con gli inconciliabili, ha prodotto, tra gli altri singolari aspetti della situazione, questo fatto: che il gruppo più recente è composto un po’ troppo di coloro che sono in grado di insegnare, mentre non esiste ancora una folla sufficiente, né un pubblico più vasto, di coloro che sono in grado di imparare. Vi è, per esempio, un’enorme massa di materiale nella storia cattolica per ottimi romanzi o drammi; e vi è una considerevole proporzione di cattolici capaci di scriverli; ma non esiste ancora un numero sufficiente di lettori comuni capaci di leggerli, nel senso di comprenderli. Ciò è vero soprattutto per l’alta qualità storica dell’ironia.
Un inglese che prenda coscienza della vera storia religiosa del suo paese si imbatte di continuo in piccoli episodi sociali e politici, la cui ironia è grande quanto la tragedia greca; e poi si ricorda della maggior parte degli altri inglesi, ed è costretto ad ammettere che per loro sarebbe arabo. Proprio quel punto ironico che a lui dà un torvo compiacimento sarebbe del tutto privo di senso, perché il pubblico in generale prenderebbe probabilmente il suggerimento in tutta serietà, senza nemmeno cogliere lo scherzo.
Così, almeno fino a poco fa, il pubblico difficilmente coglieva lo scherzo del parlare della Regina Vergine Regina o della Gloriosa Rivoluzione. Non si può avere dramma senza pubblico; non si può avere ironia senza un pubblico istruito.
Mi domandavo l’altro giorno se qualcuno avesse mai pensato a una commedia, o piuttosto a una scena, che potrebbe essere una scena bellissima scritta da chiunque conosca bene l’Inghilterra del Settecento. La si potrebbe intitolare «Cinque irlandesi».
Seduti attorno a un tavolo in una caffetteria (ma cospicuamente non intenti a bere caffè) vi sarebbero Goldsmith, un vecchio Tory quasi giacobita; Sheridan, un più giovane Whig quasi giacobino; Burke, un Whig più allarmato di qualunque Tory circa il turbamento dell’equilibrio della Costituzione britannica (che egli aveva in gran parte inventato di sana pianta con la sua testa altamente immaginosa); Grattan, oratore Whig anch’egli, ma nativo del Parlamento irlandese; e (se lo si potesse trascinar dentro in qualche modo) qualcuno di più pericoloso, come Lord Edward o Tone, che presagisce la Ribellione irlandese. Tutti costoro erano protestanti. Tutti, o nelle proprie persone o attraverso le loro famiglie, potevano in qualche modo esser fatti risalire al tempo in cui parve che il cuore dell’Irlanda si fosse spezzato; e per un uomo che non abbandonasse la Fede non vi era alcuna normale speranza sulla terra.
Credo che qualcuno potrebbe fare un bello studio, in vari stadi, di come strato dopo strato cominciasse a incrinarsi e quella terribile, proibita Cosa ancestrale si levasse lentamente a incombere su di loro come uno spettro. Comincerebbero decorosamente, s’intende, probabilmente discutendo l’Emancipazione cattolica con fredda liberalità pagana; e il vino e le parole e la passione irlandese per la recriminazione personale, e specialmente per la rievocazione familiare, farebbero zampillare strane cose dalle profondità; e attraverso una scena furiosa mi è parso davvero di udire d’un tratto l’acuta voce di Sheridan, stridula per l’ebbrezza, gridare qualche insulto: «Hai dimenticato quello, O’Bourke?» E allora mi sono ricordato che un pubblico in un teatro di Londra non capirebbe probabilmente nulla dell’idea di quella grande, eterna Cosa che terribilmente ritorna; perché un buon numero di loro non sa che essa è eterna, e a stento che essa è grande.
Nel garbatissimo ritratto della Regina Vittoria di Edith Sitwell mi sono imbattuto in un altro bizzarro piccolo dramma, che in questo caso sarebbe un dialogo a due. E in questo caso, la cosa accadde davvero. Vi è descritta brevemente e con imparzialità; ma chiunque conosca le persone e l’epoca può facilmente comprenderla e ampliarla; e a me diverte enormemente; diverte ed è anche enorme. Ha esattamente quella torva ironia greca del contrasto tra grandi cose conosciute e la cosa più grande che non è conosciuta. Fu una discussione, e persino una disputa tra due eminentissimi vittoriani. Verteva sulla notizia della proclamazione del dogma dell’Immacolata Concezione.
Erano entrambi uomini dabbene; erano entrambi uomini di primissimo piano agli occhi del pubblico. Entrambi avevano la più raffinata cultura del protestante; entrambi avevano una lieve venatura di pedanteria; ma entrambi avevano un calore di generosa convinzione per le loro cause predilette; nessuno dei due era certamente uno sciocco; nessuno dei due era un anticattolico nel senso gretto e volgare; entrambi credevano d’esser inondati dalla piena luce del giorno dell’età dei lumi e della libertà; e, al tempo stesso, entrambi avevano passatempi e interessi intelligenti che potevano ammorbidirli verso più antiche tradizioni religiose.
Uno era un gran lettore dei Padri e della prima letteratura devozionale; l’altro aveva un gusto genuino per ciò che era ancora spesso considerato la puerile e dozzinale bigiotteria della pittura medievale. Uno era un membro dell’Alta Chiesa del Movimento di Oxford; l’altro era un luterano liberale. Uno era il grande Gladstone; l’altro era Alberto, il Principe Consorte.
I due uomini conversarono e furono in disaccordo. Furono in netto disaccordo. Il punto su cui erano in disaccordo era straordinario. Ma non era straordinario neppure per un centesimo quanto il punto su cui erano d’accordo.
Il signor Gladstone era assai addolorato perché aveva trovato il Principe Consorte in uno stato di ilarità indecente, gli pareva, per la notizia riguardante l’Immacolata Concezione. L’ilarità indecente non è un vizio che macchi in modo cospicuo il nome del Principe Alberto, più di quanto macchi quello di Gladstone; due disputanti più solenni sarebbe difficile trovarli. Ma il Principe Alberto era il più allegro, perché (disse in sostanza) è sempre una buona cosa quando un sistema malvagio che vacilla verso la sua caduta compie qualche atto d’arroganza follemente insensato e frenetico; il che con tutta certezza lo trascinerà al crollo finale. Roma era arrancata avanti in qualche modo fino ad allora; ma, ovviamente, Roma non avrebbe più avuto una gamba su cui reggersi dopo di ciò.
Ma il signor Gladstone (del Movimento di Oxford) non poteva unirsi a questo semplice trionfo tedesco sul disastro e sull’onta che avevano finalmente distrutto la Città Eterna. Con quei profondi toni di rimprovero che sapeva padroneggiare così bene, rimproverò il Principe per la sua insensibilità a questo annientamento e infangamento di un nome che tanto aveva significato nella storia; nessun cristiano, egli sentiva, poteva restare insensibile alla totale rovina di una sezione così ampia del mondo cristiano. Diceva sul serio. Ne era tremendamente turbato. Ritornò sull’argomento in seguito; implorando ripetutamente il Principe Alberto di versare almeno una lacrima sulle rovine di San Pietro, ormai giacenti desolate quanto Stonehenge.
Ma anche il Principe fu fermo; e rimase nel suo stato piuttosto raro di alto morale per la notizia che l’affare indebitamente protratto era concluso; e il Papa aveva finalmente firmato la propria rovina.
E tutto ciò per che cosa? Perché una corona in più era stata aggiunta a quella torre di corone che folla dopo folla, città dopo città, nazione dopo nazione, età dopo età, hanno innalzato sempre più in alto sull’ immagine che, fra tutte le altre, è più saldamente basata, fondata ed edificata, per quanto riguarda questa terra, nell’affetto del popolo universale. E il Principe Alberto, con le sue disinteressate fatiche per l’educazione delle classi lavoratrici, e Gladstone, con il suo fiducioso appello al gran cuore del popolo, comprendevano così poco di ciò che quella corona e quell’immagine realmente significassero per milioni di comuni poveri, in tutte le campagne e le città di mezzo mondo, che si aspettavano davvero che essa sarebbe stata detronizzata come una tirannia, per quest’ultima insolenza rovinosa nelle pretese di un tiranno.
L’unica cosa straordinaria su cui questi uomini straordinari concordavano, a quanto pare, era che la decisione sarebbe stata impopolare. … Una delle Ballate di Belloc aveva un ritornello ricordato soprattutto per l’Envoi, che diceva:
Principe, è vero che quando incontrasti lo Zar dicesti che gli inglesi trovano volgare ravvivare a nuova vita un sigaro semispento? Buon Dio, quanto poco sanno i ricchi!
Comunque sia, l’unico assunto condiviso da questi ammirevoli uomini pubblici pare sia stato errato in qualche punto. Le venditrici di mele non si precipitarono all’impazzata fuori dalla chiesa; le sartine nelle soffitte non scagliarono a terra le loro piccole immagini di Maria, apprendendo che era stata chiamata Immacolata.
Quattro anni dopo che questi potentati ebbero il loro deplorevole dissidio, mentre il Vescovo ancora aggrottava le ciglia e il parroco temeva di credere, piccoli capannelli di poveri contadini cominciarono a raccogliersi intorno a una strana bambina denutrita davanti a una fenditura nelle rocce, dalla quale sarebbe scaturito uno strano ruscello e quasi una nuova città; le rocce che ella aveva udito risuonare di una voce che gridava: «Io sono l’Immacolata Concezione…».
«Buon Dio, quanto poco sanno i ricchi!»
LAUGHTER
If we in any sense propose for discussion the subject of Laughter, we shall normally notice that our neighbours receive it in one of two ways. Either they laugh, which is perhaps the best thing they could do with a proposal for the analysis of laughter; since practice is better than precept; and anyone sitting down, as I do here, to write a whole article on this subject is a very proper object for the derision of mankind. But if they have sense enough to laugh, they will also probably have sense enough to go away; the colloquy will be cut short and exhibit only the kind of wit which is identified with brevity.
If, on the other hand, we mention Laughter to them and they do not laugh, what they always do is this; to twist their silly faces into expressions of ferocious gravity and gloom and begin to talk about Primitive Psychology, and the automatic reflexes of Pithecanthropus; and after a month or two of this cheery little chat, they practically always bring out the result (which is an unmistakable sign and a symptom of their dying minds) that “laughter is, after all, founded on some form of the instinct of cruelty”. The whole being a neat and polished exposition of the great modern habit of being as unscientific as possible in the use of scientific words. They have not yet proved that there is any instinct of cruelty, any more than there is an instinct of chewing glass. Some lunatics do chew glass; even some eminent men have done it; I think the famous Sir Richard Grenville had the habit. Some men have a perversion called cruelty; but if primitive men develop a talent for humour from a perversion of cruelty, it is quite as difficult to explain how they developed the perversion as how they developed the talent. We might as well explain the beginning of poetry by saying that Pithecanthropus was addicted to cocaine. The whole thing is one of those impudent insinuations of popular science, quite unsupported by serious science, but having a very strong moral or anti-moral motive; to suggest by innumerable irresponsible hints that human beings owe everything to semi-human beings called primitive men; and that these were utterly degraded creatures, dwelling in a darkness of hatred and fear.
On the face of it, all this theory of laughter is laughable. Anybody can make a child laugh by some simple inversion or incongruity; such as putting spectacles on the teddy bear. Are we asked to believe that a dark troglodyte stirs in the cave of the infant’s skull, and takes pleasure in torturing the teddy bear with unfamiliar optical conditions; or fiendishly rejoices in the agony of an aged uncle when temporarily deprived of his goggles? The sort of literature at which children really laugh is the simplest sort of nonsense like “the cow jumped over the moon”. Are we to suppose children lie awake and laugh to think of the long and chilly journey of the lost quadruped, in the cold altitudes wholly unsuited to warm-blooded mammals? It is obvious that the mind is amused with incongruity, when there is no direct or indirect idea of discomfort. Why it is amused with incongruity is indeed a very deep question, and we shall get no further with such questions until we adopt a totally different attitude to the whole story of man; until we have the patience to respect a great many of the mysteries as mysteries, and wait for an explanation which really explains; instead of jumping at any explanation that merely explains away. But I suspect it will be found connected with the idea of human dignity rather than indignity; and rather related to the strangeness of man on this strange earth, than to the mere dull brutalities connecting him with the dull mud.
It is not surprising that an age exhibiting this monstrous spectacle, of men being sombre and pessimistic about the origin of Laughter, should also exhibit some loss of the simpler sort of laughter in its literature and art. And I fancy even those who might claim that we produce more humour would admit that we produce less laughter. But the poison of the anti-human heresy I have mentioned works back in a curious fashion into the practice of those who have heard the theory; and the ideas of cause and effect act and react on each other. It may be that only in a dry age could pedants be found to trace back all mirth to malignity; it may be that the atmospheric suggestion of that origin has made the mirth less mirthful, and more dry if not more malignant. But certainly, at the best, the tendency of recent culture has been to tolerate the smile but discourage the laugh. There are three differences involved here. First, that the smile can unobtrusively turn into the sneer; second, that the smile is always individual and even secretive (especially if it is a little mad), while the laugh can be social and gregarious, and is perhaps the one genuine surviving form of the General Will; and third, that laughing lays itself open to criticism, is innocent and unguarded, has the sort of humanity which has always something of humility. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticising the men who laugh. We may read in any current novel, “Grigsby stroked his chin and smiled a rather superior smile.” We seldom read, even in a novel, “Grigsby flung back his head and howled at the ceiling with a slightly superior laugh.” The moment Grigsby abandons himself so far as to laugh he has lost something of that perfect superiority of the Grigsbys, for which they are famous in fashionable circles, and for which so many of their fellow-creatures would love to kick them, as old Weller kicked Mr. Stiggins. For it is a complete mistake to suppose that there is less cruelty since we abandoned the good old custom of kicking Mr. Stiggins. The only difference is that it is Mr. Grigsby who is allowed to be cruel; because of the lack of simpler and humbler men to enjoy the innocent pleasure of kicking him. In the mind of Mr. Grigsby, at that exquisite moment when he smiles, there is infinitely more cruelty, in the sense of mere malice, than there was in the mind of Weller when he applied the boot, or Dickens when he wrote the book. The chief mark of the most modern change in the world is that milder social manners do not go with warmer social feelings. The chief fact we have to face today is the absence of even that amount of democratic comradeship which was involved in coarse laughter or merely conventional ridicule. The men of the older fellowship may have sometimes unjustly disliked a scapegoat or an alien, but they liked each other much more than a good many literary men now like each other. It is obvious in a thousand ways that there was more communal sentiment, or if you will sentimentality, in the camps where Bret Harte’s ruffians brandished bowie-knives and revolvers, or in the public-house cellar where Mr. Bardell was knocked on the head with a quart pot, than in many a modern intellectual circle in which the soul is at last finally isolated, like the heads in hell held apart in their rings of ice. Therefore, in this modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favour of laughing. Laughter has something in it in common with the ancient winds of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes men forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves; something (as the common phrase goes about a joke) that they cannot resist. The saint is he who enjoys good things and refuses them. The prig is he who despises good things and enjoys them. But when he hears a really good thing, which he really enjoys, then he can no longer despise it. On that awful and apocalyptic occasion, he does not smile; he laughs.
LA RISATA
Se in qualche modo proponiamo alla discussione l’argomento della Risata, di solito ci accorgeremo che il nostro prossimo lo accoglie in uno di due modi. O ride, che è forse la cosa migliore che possa fare d’una proposta di analisi della risata; giacché la pratica vale più del precetto; e chiunque si metta a sedere, come faccio io qui, per scrivere un intero articolo su questo argomento è un bersaglio quanto mai appropriato per la derisione del genere umano. Ma se hanno abbastanza buonsenso da ridere, avranno probabilmente anche abbastanza buonsenso da andarsene; il colloquio verrà troncato e mostrerà soltanto quella specie di arguzia che si identifica con la brevità.
Se, d’altra parte, accenniamo loro alla Risata ed essi non ridono, quel che fanno immancabilmente è questo: contorcono le loro sciocche facce in espressioni di feroce gravità e cupezza e cominciano a parlare di Psicologia Primitiva e dei riflessi automatici del Pitecantropo; e dopo un mese o due di questa allegra chiacchierata, tirano fuori quasi sempre la conclusione (che è segno inequivocabile e sintomo delle loro menti morenti) che «la risata, in fin dei conti, si fonda su qualche forma dell’istinto di crudeltà». Il tutto essendo una lucida e levigata esposizione della grande abitudine moderna di essere quanto più antiscientifici possibile nell’uso di parole scientifiche. Non hanno ancora dimostrato che esista un istinto di crudeltà, più di quanto esista un istinto di masticare il vetro. Certi pazzi masticano davvero il vetro; l’hanno fatto perfino certi uomini eminenti; credo che il celebre Sir Richard Grenville ne avesse l’abitudine. Certi uomini hanno una perversione chiamata crudeltà; ma se gli uomini primitivi svilupparono un talento per l’umorismo a partire da una perversione di crudeltà, è altrettanto difficile spiegare come svilupparono la perversione quanto come svilupparono il talento. Potremmo altrettanto bene spiegare l’origine della poesia dicendo che il Pitecantropo era dedito alla cocaina. L’intera faccenda è una di quelle impudenti insinuazioni della scienza popolare, priva d’ogni sostegno da parte della scienza seria, ma dotata d’un movente morale, o antimorale, assai forte: suggerire con innumerevoli allusioni irresponsabili che gli esseri umani debbano tutto a esseri semiumani chiamati uomini primitivi; e che costoro fossero creature del tutto degradate, dimoranti in una tenebra di odio e di paura.
A prima vista, tutta questa teoria della risata è risibile. Chiunque può far ridere un bambino con una qualche semplice inversione o incongruenza, come mettere gli occhiali all’orsacchiotto. Ci si chiede forse di credere che un tenebroso troglodita si agiti nella caverna del cranio del lattante, e si compiaccia di torturare l’orsacchiotto con inconsuete condizioni ottiche; o che esulti diabolicamente per l’agonia d’un vecchio zio momentaneamente privato dei suoi occhialoni? Il genere di letteratura di cui i bambini ridono davvero è la specie più semplice di nonsenso, come «la mucca saltò oltre la luna». Dobbiamo forse supporre che i bambini stiano svegli a ridere pensando al lungo e gelido viaggio dello smarrito quadrupede, nelle fredde altitudini del tutto inadatte ai mammiferi a sangue caldo? È evidente che la mente si diverte dell’incongruenza, quando non v’è idea alcuna, diretta o indiretta, di sofferenza. Perché essa si diverta dell’incongruenza è invero una domanda assai profonda, e non faremo passi avanti con simili domande finché non adotteremo un atteggiamento del tutto diverso verso l’intera storia dell’uomo; finché non avremo la pazienza di rispettare gran parte dei misteri in quanto misteri, e di attendere una spiegazione che davvero spieghi, invece di gettarci su qualsiasi spiegazione che si limiti a spiegar via. Ma sospetto che la si troverà connessa all’idea della dignità umana piuttosto che dell’indignità; e più legata alla stranezza dell’uomo su questa strana terra, che non alle mere e ottuse brutalità che lo congiungono all’ottuso fango.
Non sorprende che un’epoca la quale offre questo mostruoso spettacolo di uomini tetri e pessimisti riguardo all’origine della Risata mostri anche una certa perdita della specie più semplice di riso nella propria letteratura e arte. E immagino che perfino coloro i quali pretendessero che noi produciamo più umorismo ammetterebbero che produciamo meno risa. Ma il veleno dell’eresia antiumana che ho menzionato si ripercuote in curioso modo sulla pratica di quanti hanno udito la teoria; e le idee di causa ed effetto agiscono e reagiscono l’una sull’altra. Può darsi che solo in un’epoca arida si potessero trovare pedanti disposti a ricondurre ogni ilarità alla malignità; può darsi che la suggestione atmosferica di quell’origine abbia reso l’ilarità meno ilare, e più arida se non più maligna. Ma di certo, nel migliore dei casi, la tendenza della cultura recente è stata di tollerare il sorriso ma scoraggiare la risata. Vi sono qui coinvolte tre differenze. Primo, che il sorriso può trasformarsi impercettibilmente nel ghigno; secondo, che il sorriso è sempre individuale e persino segreto (specialmente se è un po’ folle), mentre la risata può essere sociale e gregaria, ed è forse l’unica genuina forma superstite della Volontà Generale; e terzo, che il ridere si espone alla critica, è innocente e indifeso, ha quella sorta di umanità che porta sempre in sé qualcosa di umiltà. La fase recente della cultura e della critica potrebbe assai bene riassumersi come gli uomini che sorridono nell’atto di criticare gli uomini che ridono. Possiamo leggere in qualunque romanzo corrente: «Grigsby si accarezzò il mento e sorrise d’un sorriso alquanto altezzoso». Di rado leggiamo, perfino in un romanzo: «Grigsby rovesciò il capo all’indietro e ululò verso il soffitto con una risata lievemente altezzosa». Nell’istante in cui Grigsby si abbandona al punto di ridere, ha perduto qualcosa di quella perfetta superiorità dei Grigsby, per cui sono famosi negli ambienti alla moda, e per cui tanti loro simili amerebbero prenderli a calci, come il vecchio Weller prese a calci il signor Stiggins. Giacché è un errore completo supporre che vi sia meno crudeltà da quando abbiamo abbandonato la buona vecchia usanza di prendere a calci il signor Stiggins. L’unica differenza è che è il signor Grigsby a cui è concesso di essere crudele, per la mancanza di uomini più semplici e più umili che godano dell’innocente piacere di prenderlo a calci. Nella mente del signor Grigsby, in quel raffinato istante in cui sorride, vi è infinitamente più crudeltà, nel senso di mera malizia, di quanta ve ne fosse nella mente di Weller quando applicava lo stivale, o di Dickens quando scriveva il libro. Il tratto principale del più moderno mutamento del mondo è che maniere sociali più miti non si accompagnano a sentimenti sociali più caldi. Il fatto principale che oggi dobbiamo affrontare è l’assenza persino di quel tanto di democratico cameratismo che era implicato nella risata grossolana o nel ridicolo meramente convenzionale. Gli uomini dell’antica confraternita potranno talvolta aver ingiustamente detestato un capro espiatorio o un estraneo, ma si volevano bene tra loro assai più di quanto oggi si vogliano bene molti letterati. È evidente in mille modi che vi era più sentimento comunitario, o se volete sentimentalismo, negli accampamenti dove i furfanti di Bret Harte brandivano coltellacci e rivoltelle, o nella cantina della taverna dove il signor Bardell fu percosso sul capo con un boccale da una pinta, che non in tanti moderni circoli intellettuali in cui l’anima è finalmente isolata del tutto, come le teste all’inferno tenute separate nei loro anelli di ghiaccio. Perciò, in questo moderno conflitto tra il Sorriso e la Risata, io sono tutto a favore del ridere. La risata ha in sé qualcosa in comune con gli antichi venti della fede e dell’ispirazione; disgela l’orgoglio e scioglie la segretezza; fa sì che gli uomini dimentichino sé stessi al cospetto di qualcosa di più grande di loro; qualcosa (come dice la frase corrente a proposito d’una barzelletta) a cui non sanno resistere. Il santo è colui che gode delle cose buone e le rifiuta. Il pedante presuntuoso è colui che disprezza le cose buone e ne gode. Ma quando ode una cosa davvero buona, di cui davvero gode, allora non può più disprezzarla. In quella tremenda e apocalittica occasione, egli non sorride: ride.
TALES FROM TOLSTOI
In one sense there is a real and actual law of progress by which we grow simpler as we grow more civilised, for the more we scan and study the phenomena around us the more they tend to unify themselves with the power behind them, and the whole of existence thus seen for the first time seems something of an entirely new shape and colour, a fresh and surprising thing. And all the great writers of our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish communication with the elemental or, as it is sometimes more roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the return to nature consists in drinking no wine ; some think that it consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into very ineffectual British War Office bayonets.
It is natural, according to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionists, to kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoi by seeing how much he can reject.
Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature, especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy tale who should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would find his tail growing like a tree in the meadow at the end of the world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search of nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity, much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think that she is heeding us least. “Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,” said the Hebrew poets. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a man’s back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoi. We feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.
King Solomon brought merchant men Because of his desire With peacocks, apes and ivory, From Tarshish unto Tyre.
But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a part of his folly—I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoi, we feel, would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at “Solomon in all his glory”. With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.
Any collection of Tales from Tolstoi is calculated to draw particular attention to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoi’s work. In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the work of Tolstoi is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is that an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoi comes out constantly in his stories, the great moral which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all the tales, the folklore simplicity with which “a man or a woman” are spoken of without further identification, the love—one might almost say the lust— for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man— these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoi, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoi has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one’s corner of a great and good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoi the great artist with Tolstoi the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being with the landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called, the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.
RACCONTI DA TOLSTOJ
In un certo senso esiste una legge reale ed effettiva del progresso, per cui diventiamo più semplici man mano che ci facciamo più civili; poiché quanto più scrutiamo e studiamo i fenomeni che ci circondano, tanto più essi tendono a fondersi con la potenza che sta dietro di loro, e l’intera esistenza, così veduta per la prima volta, sembra qualcosa di una forma e di un colore interamente nuovi, una cosa fresca e sorprendente. E tutti i grandi scrittori del nostro tempo rappresentano, in una forma o nell’altra, questo tentativo di ristabilire la comunicazione con l’elementare, ovvero, come talora ci si esprime in modo più rozzo e fallace, di ritornare alla natura. Alcuni ritengono che il ritorno alla natura consista nel non bere vino; altri ritengono che consista nel berne assai più di quanto convenga loro. Alcuni pensano che il ritorno alla natura si consegua trasformando le spade in vomeri; altri pensano che si consegua trasformando i vomeri in baionette del tutto inefficaci da Ministero della Guerra britannico.
È naturale, secondo il patriottardo, che un uomo uccida gli altri con la polvere da sparo e sé stesso con il gin. È naturale, secondo i rivoluzionari umanitari, uccidere gli altri con la dinamite e sé stessi con il vegetarianismo. Sarebbe forse un sentimento troppo scopertamente filisteo suggerire che la pretesa dell’uno o dell’altro di questi individui di obbedire alla voce della natura sia curiosa, ove si consideri che essi hanno bisogno di enormi volumi di argomentazioni paradossali per persuadere sé stessi o chiunque altro della verità delle loro conclusioni. Ma i giganti del nostro tempo si somigliano indubbiamente nel fatto che giungono, per vie assai diverse, a questa concezione del ritorno alla semplicità. Ibsen ritorna alla natura attraverso l’esteriorità angolosa del fatto, Maeterlinck attraverso le eterne tendenze della favola. Whitman ritorna alla natura vedendo quanto può accettare, Tolstoj vedendo quanto può respingere.
Ora, questo eroico desiderio di ritornare alla natura è, s’intende, per certi versi, piuttosto simile all’eroico desiderio di un gattino di ritornare alla propria coda. Una coda è un oggetto semplice e bello, ritmico nella curva e piacevole al tatto; ma è certo una delle minori ma caratteristiche qualità di una coda quella di pendere dietro. È impossibile negare che perderebbe in qualche misura il suo carattere se venisse attaccata a qualsiasi altra parte dell’anatomia. Ebbene, la natura è come una coda, nel senso che è di vitale importanza, se vuole assolvere il suo vero compito, che essa stia sempre dietro. Immaginare di poter vedere la natura, e specialmente la nostra propria natura, faccia a faccia è una follia; è persino una bestemmia. È come la condotta di un gatto, in qualche folle fiaba, che si mettesse in viaggio con la ferma convinzione di trovare la propria coda a crescere come un albero nel prato ai confini del mondo. E l’effetto reale dei viaggi del filosofo in cerca della natura, visto dal di fuori, somiglia assai alle piroette del gattino che insegue la coda, con molto entusiasmo ma poca dignità, molto strepito e ben poca coda. La grandezza della natura sta nel fatto che essa è onnipotente e invisibile, e che forse ci governa più quando crediamo che meno ci badi. «Tu sei un Dio che ti nascondi», dicevano i poeti ebrei. Si può dire con ogni riverenza che è dietro la schiena di un uomo che si cela lo spirito della natura.
È questa considerazione che presta un certo che di futile perfino a tutte le ispirate semplicità e alle tuonanti veracità di Tolstoj. Sentiamo che un uomo non può rendersi semplice semplicemente muovendo guerra alla complessità; sentiamo, anzi, nei nostri momenti più assennati, che un uomo non può affatto rendersi semplice. Una semplicità cosciente di sé può ben essere assai più intrinsecamente ornata del lusso medesimo. Anzi, gran parte della pompa e della sontuosità della storia del mondo fu semplice nel senso più vero. Nacque da una ricettività quasi puerile; fu opera di uomini che avevano occhi per meravigliarsi e uomini che avevano orecchi per udire.
Il re Salomone fece venire i mercanti per il suo desiderio, con pavoni, scimmie e avorio, da Tarsis fino a Tiro.
Ma questo procedere non faceva parte della saggezza di Salomone; faceva parte della sua follia—avrei quasi detto della sua innocenza. Tolstoj, lo sentiamo, non si contenterebbe di scagliare satira e denuncia contro «Salomone in tutta la sua gloria». Con feroce e inoppugnabile logica andrebbe un passo oltre. Trascorrerebbe giorni e notti nei prati a strappare gli spudorati diademi cremisi dai gigli del campo.
Qualsiasi raccolta di Racconti da Tolstoj è fatta apposta per richiamare particolare attenzione su questo lato etico e ascetico dell’opera di Tolstoj. In un certo senso, e nel senso più profondo, l’opera di Tolstoj è, s’intende, un genuino e nobile appello alla semplicità. L’angusta nozione secondo cui a un artista non sarebbe lecito insegnare è ormai ben demolita. Ma la verità della faccenda è che un artista insegna assai di più con il suo semplice sfondo e con i suoi accessori, il suo paesaggio, il suo costume, il suo idioma e la sua tecnica—tutta quella parte, insomma, del suo lavoro di cui egli è probabilmente del tutto inconsapevole, che non con gli elaborati e pomposi precetti morali che ama immaginare siano le sue opinioni. La vera distinzione tra l’etica dell’arte alta e l’etica dell’arte fabbricata e didascalica sta nel semplice fatto che la cattiva favola ha una morale, mentre la buona favola è una morale. E la vera morale di Tolstoj emerge di continuo nei suoi racconti, la grande morale che sta al cuore di tutta la sua opera, di cui egli è probabilmente inconsapevole, e che assai probabilmente disapproverebbe con veemenza. La curiosa fredda luce bianca del mattino che splende su tutti i racconti, la semplicità da folklore con cui si parla di «un uomo o una donna» senza ulteriore identificazione, l’amore—si potrebbe quasi dire la libidine—per le qualità delle materie brute, la durezza del legno e la mollezza del fango, la radicata fede in una certa antica benevolenza assisa accanto alla culla stessa della stirpe umana—queste influenze sono veramente morali. Quando accanto a esse poniamo le trombettanti e laceranti insulsaggini del Tolstoj didascalico, che strilla per una purezza oscena, che grida per una pace disumana, che fa a pezzi la vita umana in piccoli peccati con la mannaia, che sogghigna verso uomini, donne e bambini per rispetto all’umanità, combinando in un solo caos di contraddizioni un puritano privo di virilità e un pedante incivile, allora, in verità, non sappiamo più dove Tolstoj sia svanito. Non sappiamo che farci di questo piccolo e chiassoso moralista che abita l’angolo di un uomo grande e buono.
È difficile in ogni caso conciliare Tolstoj il grande artista con Tolstoj il riformatore quasi velenoso. È difficile credere che un uomo il quale traccia in così nobili contorni la dignità della vita quotidiana dell’umanità reputi malvagio quel divino atto di procreazione per cui quella dignità si rinnova di età in età. È difficile credere che un uomo il quale ha dipinto con così spaventosa onestà lo strappacuore vuoto della vita dei poveri possa davvero invidiar loro ognuno dei loro pietosi piaceri, dal corteggiamento al tabacco. È difficile credere che un poeta in prosa il quale ha con tanta potenza mostrato l’aria terrigna dell’uomo, l’essenziale parentela di un essere umano con il paesaggio in cui vive, possa negare una virtù tanto elementare quanto quella che lega un uomo ai propri antenati e alla propria terra. È difficile credere che l’uomo il quale sente così acutamente la detestabile insolenza dell’oppressione non stenderebbe davvero a terra l’oppressore con un pugno, se ne avesse l’occasione. Tutto, tuttavia, nasce dalla ricerca di una falsa semplicità, dall’aspirazione a essere, se così posso esprimermi, più naturali di quanto sia naturale essere. Sarebbe non solo più umano, sarebbe più umile da parte nostra accontentarci di essere complessi. La più vera parentela con l’umanità starebbe nel fare come l’umanità ha sempre fatto, accettando con gusto sportivo la condizione a cui siamo chiamati, la stella della nostra felicità e le sorti della terra in cui siamo nati.
THE NEW CASE FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
Any amount of nonsense has been talked about the need of novelty, and in that sense there is nothing particularly meritorious about being modern. A man who seriously describes his creed as Modernism might just as well invent a creed called Mondayism, meaning that he puts special faith in the fancies that occurred to him on Monday; or a creed called Morningism, meaning that he believed in the thoughts that occurred to him in the morning but not in the afternoon.
Modernity is only the moment of time in which we happen to find ourselves, and nobody who thinks will suppose that it is bound to be superior, either to the time that comes after it or to the time that went before. But in a relative and rational sense we may congratulate ourselves on knowing the news of the moment, and having realised recent facts or discoveries that some people still ignore.
And it is in that sense that we may truly call the fundamental concept of Catholic Education a scientific fact, and especially a psychological fact. Our demand for a complete culture, based on its own philosophy and religion, is a demand that is really unanswerable, in the light of the most vital and even the most modern psychology. For that matter, for those who care for such things, there could hardly be a word more modern than atmosphere.
Now, so long as they are engaged in doing anything whatever except arguing with us, our modern and scientific friends are never tired of telling us that education must be treated as a whole; that all parts of the mind affect each other; that nothing is too trivial to be significant and even symbolic; that all thoughts can be coloured by conscious or unconscious emotions; that knowledge can never be in watertight compartments; that what may seem a senseless detail may be the symbol of a deep desire; that nothing is negative, nothing is naked, nothing stands separate and alone.
They use these arguments for all sorts of purposes, some of them sensible enough, some of them almost insanely silly; but this is, broadly speaking, how they argue. And the one thing they do not know is that they are arguing in favour of Catholic education, and especially in favour of Catholic atmosphere in Catholic schools. Perhaps if they did know they would leave off.
As a matter of fact, those who refuse to understand that Catholic children must have an entirely Catholic school are back in the bad old days, as they would express it, when nobody wanted education but only instruction. They are relics of the dead time when it was thought enough to drill pupils in two or three dull and detached lessons that were supposed to be quite mechanical. They descend from the original Philistine who first talked about “The Three R.s”; and the joke about him is very symbolic of his type or time. For he was the sort of man who insists very literally on literacy, and, even in doing so, shows himself illiterate.
They were very uneducated rich men who loudly demanded education. And among the marks of their ignorance and stupidity was the particular mark that they regarded letters and figures as dead things, quite separate from each other and from a general view of life. They thought of a boy learning his letters as something quite cut off, for instance, from what is meant by a man of letters. They thought a calculating boy could be made like a calculating machine.
When somebody said to them, therefore, “These things must be taught in a spiritual atmosphere”, they thought it was nonsense; they had a vague idea that it meant that a child could only do a simple addition sum when surrounded with the smell of incense. But they thought simple addition much more simple than it is. When the Catholic controversialist said to them, “Even the alphabet can be learnt in a Catholic way”, they thought he was a raving bigot, they thought he meant that nobody must ever read anything but a Latin missal.
But he meant what he said, and what he said is thoroughly sound psychology. There is a Catholic view of learning the alphabet; for instance, it prevents you from thinking that the only thing that matters is learning the alphabet; or from despising better people than yourself, if they do not happen to have learnt the alphabet.
The old unpsychological school of instructors used to say: “What possible sense can there be in mixing up arithmetic with religion?” But arithmetic is mixed up with religion, or at the worst with philosophy. It does make a great deal of difference whether the instructor implies that truth is real, or relative, or changeable, or an illusion. The man who said, “Two and two may make five in the fixed stars”, was teaching arithmetic in an anti-rational way, and, therefore, in an anti-Catholic way. The Catholic is much more certain about the fixed truths than about the fixed stars.
But I am not now arguing which philosophy is the better; I am only pointing out that every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all. And the modern educationists, the modern psychologists, the modern men of science, all agree in asserting and reasserting this—until they begin to quarrel with Catholics over Catholic schools.
In short, if there is a psychological truth discoverable by human reason, it is this; that Catholics must either go without Catholic teaching or possess and govern Catholic schools. There is a case for refusing to allow Catholic families to grow up Catholic, by any machinery worth calling education in the existing sense. There is a case for refusing to make any concessions to Catholics at all, and ignoring their idiosyncrasy as if it were an insanity. There is a case for that, because there is and always has been a case for persecution; for the State acting on the principle that certain philosophies are false and dangerous and must be crushed even if they are sincerely held; indeed that they must be crushed, especially if they are sincerely held.
But if Catholics are to teach Catholicism all the time, they cannot merely teach Catholic theology for part of the time. It is our opponents, and not we, who give a really outrageous and superstitious position to dogmatic theology. It is they who suppose that the special “subject” called theology can be put into people by an experiment lasting half an hour; and that this magical inoculation will last them through a week in a world that is soaked through and through with a contrary conception of life.
Theology is only articulate religion; but, strange as it seems to the true Christians who criticise us, it is necessary to have religion as well as theology. And religion, as they are often obliging enough to remind us when this particular problem is not involved, is a thing for every day of the week and not merely for Sunday or Church services.
The truth is that the modern world has committed itself to two totally different and inconsistent conceptions about education. It is always trying to expand the scope of education; and always trying to exclude from it all religion and philosophy. But this is sheer nonsense. You can have an education that teaches atheism because atheism is true, and it can be, from its own point of view, a complete education. But you cannot have an education claiming to teach all truth, and then refusing to discuss whether atheism is true.
Since the coming of the more ambitious psychological education, our schools have claimed to develop all sides of human nature; that is, to produce a complete human being. You cannot do this and totally ignore a great living tradition, which teaches that a complete human being must be a Christian or Catholic human being. You must either persecute it out of existence or allow it to make its own education complete.
When schooling was supposed to consist of spelling, of counting and making pothooks and hangers, you might make out some kind of case for saying that it could be taught indifferently by a Baptist or Buddhist. But what in the world is the sense of having an education which includes lessons in “citizenship”, for instance; and then pretending not to include anything like a moral theory, and ignoring all those who happen to hold that a moral theory depends on a moral theology.
Our schoolmasters profess to bring out every side of the pupil; the aesthetic side; the athletic side; the political side, and so on; and yet they still talk the stale cant of the nineteenth century about public instruction having nothing to do with the religious side. The truth is that, in this matter, it is our enemies who are stick-in-the mud, and still remain in the stuffy atmosphere of undeveloped and unscientific education; while we are, in this at any rate, on the side of all modern psychologists and serious educationists in recognising the idea of atmosphere. They sometimes like to call it environment.
LA NUOVA CAUSA DELLE SCUOLE CATTOLICHE
Si sono dette quantità sterminate di sciocchezze intorno alla necessità della novità, e in questo senso non c’è nulla di particolarmente meritorio nell’essere moderni. Un uomo che descriva seriamente il proprio credo come Modernismo potrebbe altrettanto bene inventarsi un credo chiamato Lunedismo, a significare che ripone una speciale fede nelle fantasie che gli sono venute in mente di lunedì; oppure un credo chiamato Mattutinismo, a significare che crede nei pensieri che gli sono venuti la mattina ma non il pomeriggio.
La modernità non è che il momento del tempo in cui ci capita di trovarci, e nessuno che rifletta supporrà che sia per forza superiore, tanto al tempo che viene dopo di essa quanto al tempo che l’ha preceduta. Ma in un senso relativo e ragionevole possiamo pur rallegrarci di conoscere le notizie del momento, e di aver preso atto di fatti o scoperte recenti che taluni ancora ignorano.
Ed è in questo senso che possiamo davvero chiamare il concetto fondamentale dell’Educazione cattolica un fatto scientifico, e in particolare un fatto psicologico. La nostra richiesta di una cultura completa, fondata su una propria filosofia e su una propria religione, è una richiesta a cui in verità non si può replicare, alla luce della psicologia più viva e persino più moderna. E del resto, per coloro che tengono a simili cose, difficilmente si potrebbe trovare parola più moderna di atmosfera.
Ora, finché sono impegnati a fare qualsivoglia cosa che non sia discutere con noi, i nostri amici moderni e scientifici non si stancano mai di ripeterci che l’educazione va trattata come un tutto; che tutte le parti della mente si influenzano a vicenda; che nulla è troppo insignificante per essere significativo e persino simbolico; che tutti i pensieri possono essere colorati da emozioni consce o inconsce; che il sapere non può mai stare in compartimenti stagni; che quello che potrebbe sembrare un dettaglio insensato può essere il simbolo di un profondo desiderio; che nulla è negativo, nulla è nudo, nulla sta separato e solo.
Adoperano questi argomenti per ogni sorta di scopi, alcuni abbastanza assennati, altri di una scempiaggine quasi folle; ma è così, grosso modo, che ragionano. E l’unica cosa che non sanno è che stanno ragionando in favore dell’educazione cattolica, e in particolare in favore dell’atmosfera cattolica nelle scuole cattoliche. Forse, se lo sapessero, smetterebbero.
In effetti, coloro che rifiutano di capire che i bambini cattolici debbono avere una scuola interamente cattolica sono rimasti indietro, ai vecchi tempi cattivi, come direbbero loro, quando nessuno voleva l’educazione ma soltanto l’istruzione. Sono reliquie di quel tempo defunto in cui si riteneva sufficiente addestrare gli allievi in due o tre lezioni tediose e slegate che si supponevano del tutto meccaniche. Discendono dal Filisteo originario che per primo parlò delle «Tre erre»; e la freddura su di lui è assai simbolica del suo tipo o del suo tempo. Perché era quella specie d’uomo che insiste alla lettera sull’alfabetismo, e, proprio così facendo, si rivela analfabeta.
Erano uomini ricchi e assai poco istruiti quelli che a gran voce reclamavano l’educazione. E fra i segni della loro ignoranza e stupidità c’era quel segno particolare per cui consideravano le lettere e le cifre come cose morte, del tutto separate l’una dall’altra e da una visione generale della vita. Pensavano a un ragazzo che impara le lettere come a qualcosa di completamente reciso, per esempio, da ciò che s’intende per uomo di lettere. Pensavano che un ragazzo che calcola potesse essere reso simile a una macchina calcolatrice.
Quando dunque qualcuno diceva loro: «Queste cose vanno insegnate in un’atmosfera spirituale», lo giudicavano una sciocchezza; avevano la vaga idea che significasse che un bambino potesse eseguire una semplice addizione solo se circondato dall’odore dell’incenso. Ma consideravano la semplice addizione ben più semplice di quanto non sia. Quando il polemista cattolico diceva loro: «Persino l’alfabeto si può imparare in modo cattolico», lo credevano un bigotto vaneggiante, credevano intendesse che nessuno dovesse mai leggere altro che un messale latino.
Ma egli intendeva quello che diceva, e ciò che diceva è psicologia perfettamente sana. Esiste un modo cattolico di guardare all’imparare l’alfabeto; esso, per esempio, ti impedisce di credere che l’unica cosa che conti sia imparare l’alfabeto; o di disprezzare persone migliori di te, per il solo fatto che a loro non è capitato di imparare l’alfabeto.
La vecchia scuola di istruttori, priva di ogni senso psicologico, era solita dire: «Che senso mai può esserci nel mescolare l’aritmetica con la religione?». Ma l’aritmetica è mescolata con la religione, o alla peggio con la filosofia. Fa una gran differenza, eccome, che l’istruttore lasci intendere che la verità è reale, oppure relativa, oppure mutevole, oppure un’illusione. L’uomo che disse: «Due più due potrebbero fare cinque nelle stelle fisse», insegnava l’aritmetica in modo anti-razionale, e, di conseguenza, in modo anti-cattolico. Il cattolico è ben più certo delle verità fisse che delle stelle fisse.
Ma io non sto ora discutendo quale filosofia sia la migliore; sto soltanto facendo notare che ogni educazione insegna una filosofia; se non per dogma, allora per suggestione, per implicazione, per atmosfera. Ogni parte di quell’educazione è in rapporto con ogni altra parte. Se non tutte concorrono a trasmettere una qualche visione generale della vita, non è educazione affatto. E i moderni educatori, i moderni psicologi, i moderni uomini di scienza, tutti convengono nell’affermare e riaffermare questo — finché non cominciano a litigare con i cattolici a proposito delle scuole cattoliche.
Insomma, se c’è una verità psicologica scopribile dalla ragione umana, è questa: che i cattolici o debbono fare a meno dell’insegnamento cattolico, oppure possedere e governare scuole cattoliche. C’è una ragione per rifiutare di lasciar crescere cattoliche le famiglie cattoliche, mediante qualsiasi congegno che meriti il nome di educazione nel senso corrente. C’è una ragione per rifiutare di fare ai cattolici qualsivoglia concessione, e per ignorarne l’idiosincrasia come se fosse una follia. C’è una ragione per questo, perché c’è, e c’è sempre stata, una ragione per la persecuzione; perché lo Stato agisca in base al principio che certe filosofie sono false e pericolose e devono essere schiacciate anche se professate in buona fede; anzi, che devono essere schiacciate soprattutto se professate in buona fede.
Ma se i cattolici devono insegnare il cattolicesimo per tutto il tempo, non possono limitarsi a insegnare la teologia cattolica per una parte del tempo. Sono i nostri avversari, e non noi, a conferire alla teologia dogmatica una posizione davvero oltraggiosa e superstiziosa. Sono loro a supporre che quella «materia» speciale che si chiama teologia possa essere infilata dentro la gente con un esperimento della durata di mezz’ora; e che questa magica inoculazione basti loro per una settimana intera in un mondo intriso da cima a fondo di una concezione della vita del tutto contraria.
La teologia non è che religione resa articolata; ma, per quanto sembri strano ai veri cristiani che ci criticano, è necessario avere tanto la religione quanto la teologia. E la religione, come essi hanno abbastanza spesso la cortesia di ricordarci quando questo particolare problema non è in ballo, è cosa per ogni giorno della settimana e non soltanto per la domenica o per le funzioni ecclesiastiche.
La verità è che il mondo moderno si è votato a due concezioni dell’educazione del tutto diverse e incoerenti fra loro. Esso cerca sempre di allargare l’ambito dell’educazione; e cerca sempre di escluderne ogni religione e filosofia. Ma questa è pura assurdità. Puoi avere un’educazione che insegna l’ateismo perché l’ateismo è vero, e può essere, dal suo proprio punto di vista, un’educazione completa. Ma non puoi avere un’educazione che pretenda di insegnare tutta la verità, e poi si rifiuti di discutere se l’ateismo sia vero.
Da quando è giunta la più ambiziosa educazione psicologica, le nostre scuole hanno preteso di sviluppare tutti i lati della natura umana; vale a dire, di produrre un essere umano completo. Non si può fare questo e insieme ignorare del tutto una grande tradizione vivente, che insegna come un essere umano completo debba essere un essere umano cristiano o cattolico. O la si perseguita fino a farla sparire, oppure le si permette di rendere completa la propria educazione.
Quando si supponeva che l’insegnamento consistesse nel compitare, nel far di conto e nel tracciare aste e uncini, si poteva sostenere una qualche ragione dicendo che poteva essere impartito indifferentemente da un battista o da un buddhista. Ma che senso ha, al mondo, avere un’educazione che comprende lezioni di «cittadinanza», per esempio; e poi fingere di non includervi nulla che somigli a una teoria morale, e ignorare tutti coloro che per caso ritengono che una teoria morale dipenda da una teologia morale.
I nostri maestri di scuola dichiarano di far emergere ogni lato dell’allievo: il lato estetico; il lato atletico; il lato politico, e così via; eppure continuano a ripetere lo stantio luogo comune ottocentesco secondo cui la pubblica istruzione non avrebbe nulla a che fare con il lato religioso. La verità è che, in questa materia, sono i nostri nemici a essere impantanati, e a restare ancora nell’atmosfera afosa di un’educazione arretrata e non scientifica; mentre noi siamo, almeno in questo, dalla parte di tutti i moderni psicologi e dei seri educatori nel riconoscere l’idea di atmosfera. A loro talvolta piace chiamarla ambiente.
VULGARITY
Vulgarity is one of the great new modern inventions; like the telephone or the wireless set. It may be plausibly maintained that the telephone is less of an instrument of torture than the thumbscrew or the rack, and in the same way that other ages had other vices that were worse than this new or modern vice. As we may find fanciful sketches of aeroplanes in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, or speculations very near to modern physics in the philosophers of ancient Greece, so we may find here and there in history a hint or foreshadowing of the great and golden vision of vulgarity that was later to burst on the world. We may find it in the smell of Punic plutocracy that stank in the nostrils of Greeks and Romans, or in a certain touch of bad taste in an aesthete like Nero.
Nevertheless, the thing is so new that the new world has not yet really found a name for it, but has had to borrow a rather misleading name, which is really the Latin word for something else. So we have to go on using the Greek name of amber as the only name of electricity because we have no notion what is the real name or nature of electricity. And so we have to go on using the Latin word vulgus, which only meant the common people, to describe something that is not particularly common among the common people.
Indeed, through long stretches of human history, and over wide spaces of the habitable globe, it is very uncommon among the common people. Farmers living by long agricultural traditions, peasants in normal villages, even savages in savage tribes, are hardly ever vulgar. Even when they massacre and enslave, even when they offer human sacrifice or eat human flesh, they are hardly ever vulgar. All travellers attest to the natural dignity of their carriage and the ceremonial gravity of their customs. Even in the more complex modern cities and civilisations the poor as such are not particularly vulgar.
No; there is a new thing, which really needs a new name, and still more, a new definition. I do not say I can define vulgarity; but, having just been reading a modern book about love, I feel inclined to throw out a few suggestions.
In so far as I can get near to its essence, it consists largely of two elements, which I should describe as facility and familiarity. The first means that a man does really, as the phrase goes, “gush”; that is, his self-expression flows without effort, selection or control. It does not come from him like picked and pointed words, passing through an articulate organ; it simply streams from him like perspiration. He need never stop explaining himself, for he understands neither himself nor the limits of explanation. He is the sort of man who understands women; he is the man who can always get on with the boys; he finds it easy to talk, easy to write, easy to speak in public, for his own self-satisfaction carries with it a sort of huge cloud and illusion of applause.
And the second element is familiarity, which, if understood, would be called profanity. Horace spoke of the “profane vulgar”, and it is true that this familiarity is the loss of holy fear and a sin against the mystical side of man. In practice it means handling things confidently and contemptuously, without the sense that all things in their way are sacred things. Its most recent mode is the readiness to write torrents of tosh on either side of any serious subject, for you hardly ever get real vulgarity on a frivolous subject.
The point is that the fool is so subjective that it never occurs to him to be afraid of the subject. For instance, he can be a Pagan fool, as well as a Puritan fool, in the debate on modern morals; but in the first case there will be torrents of tosh about love and passion and the right to live and in the other, exactly similar torrents of tosh about Christian manhood and healthy boyhood and noble motherhood and the rest. The trouble is that they are so infernally familiar with these things.
Never do you find that note in a real lover writing of the woman he loves or in a real saint writing of the sin he hates. Both say the right thing, because they would rather say nothing at all.
THE REVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY—WHY?
The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy. Such broken bits are the phrases I have quoted: efficiency and evolution and the rest. The idea of being “practical”, standing all by itself, is all that remains of a Pragmatism that cannot stand at all. It is impossible to be practical without a Pragma. And what would happen if you went up to the next practical man you met and said to the poor dear old duffer, “Where is your Pragma?” Doing the work that is nearest is obvious nonsense; yet it has been repeated in many albums. In nine cases out of ten it would mean doing the work that we are least fitted to do, such as cleaning the windows or clouting the policeman over the head. “Deeds, not words” is itself an excellent example of “Words, not thoughts”. It is a deed to throw a pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows. But there are certainly very futile words; and this sort of journalistic philosophy and popular science almost entirely consists of them.
LA VOLGARITÀ
La volgarità è una delle grandi invenzioni moderne; come il telefono o la radio. Si potrebbe con qualche verosimiglianza sostenere che il telefono sia uno strumento di tortura meno crudele della morsa o del cavalletto, e, allo stesso modo, che altre epoche ebbero altri vizi peggiori di questo vizio nuovo e moderno. Come troviamo abbozzi fantasiosi di aeroplani nei taccuini di Leonardo da Vinci, o congetture assai vicine alla fisica moderna nei filosofi della Grecia antica, così possiamo trovare qua e là nella storia un accenno o una prefigurazione della grande e aurea visione della volgarità che più tardi sarebbe esplosa sul mondo. La troviamo forse nell’odore della plutocrazia punica che ammorbava le narici dei Greci e dei Romani, o in un certo tocco di cattivo gusto in un esteta come Nerone.
Ciò nondimeno, la cosa è tanto nuova che il mondo nuovo non ha ancora trovato per essa un vero nome, ma ha dovuto prendere in prestito un nome piuttosto fuorviante, che in realtà è la parola latina per tutt’altra cosa. Così siamo costretti a continuare a usare il nome greco dell’ambra come unico nome dell’elettricità, perché non abbiamo la minima idea di quale sia il vero nome o la natura dell’elettricità. E così siamo costretti a continuare a usare la parola latina vulgus, che significava soltanto il popolo minuto, per descrivere qualcosa che non è affatto comune fra il popolo minuto.
Anzi, lungo vasti tratti della storia umana, e su ampie distese del globo abitabile, essa è assai poco comune fra la gente comune. I contadini che vivono di antiche tradizioni agricole, i villani dei villaggi normali, perfino i selvaggi nelle tribù selvagge, non sono quasi mai volgari. Anche quando massacrano e riducono in schiavitù, anche quando offrono sacrifici umani o mangiano carne umana, non sono quasi mai volgari. Tutti i viaggiatori attestano la naturale dignità del loro portamento e la cerimoniosa gravità dei loro costumi. Perfino nelle più complesse città e civiltà moderne, i poveri in quanto tali non sono particolarmente volgari.
No; c’è una cosa nuova, che ha davvero bisogno di un nome nuovo, e ancor più di una definizione nuova. Non dico di saper definire la volgarità; ma, avendo appena finito di leggere un libro moderno sull’amore, mi sento incline a buttar giù qualche suggerimento.
Per quanto riesco ad avvicinarmi alla sua essenza, essa consiste in gran parte di due elementi, che io descriverei come facilità e familiarità. Il primo significa che un uomo davvero, come si suol dire, «sbrodola»; vale a dire che la sua espressione di sé scorre senza sforzo, senza scelta né controllo. Non esce da lui come parole scelte e appuntite, che passano attraverso un organo articolato; semplicemente sgorga da lui come sudore. Non ha mai bisogno di smettere di spiegarsi, perché non comprende né se stesso né i limiti della spiegazione. È quel tipo d’uomo che capisce le donne; è l’uomo che sa sempre andar d’accordo coi ragazzi; trova facile parlare, facile scrivere, facile arringare in pubblico, perché la sua stessa autocompiacenza si porta dietro una sorta di immensa nube e illusione d’applauso.
E il secondo elemento è la familiarità, che, se ben compresa, andrebbe chiamata profanità. Orazio parlava del «volgo profano», ed è vero che questa familiarità è la perdita del sacro timore e un peccato contro il lato mistico dell’uomo. In pratica significa maneggiare le cose con sicumera e con disprezzo, senza il senso che tutte le cose, a modo loro, sono cose sacre. La sua forma più recente è la prontezza a scrivere torrenti di sciocchezze in favore o contro qualsiasi argomento serio, giacché quasi mai si incontra vera volgarità su un argomento frivolo.
Il punto è che lo sciocco è tanto soggettivo che non gli passa mai per la mente di aver timore dell’argomento. Per esempio, egli può essere uno sciocco pagano, non meno che uno sciocco puritano, nel dibattito sulla morale moderna; ma nel primo caso ci saranno torrenti di sciocchezze sull’amore e la passione e il diritto di vivere, e nell’altro torrenti di sciocchezze esattamente simili sulla virilità cristiana e la sana fanciullezza e la nobile maternità e via dicendo. Il guaio è che essi hanno una confidenza infernale con queste cose.
Mai troverete quella nota in un vero innamorato che scrive della donna che ama, o in un vero santo che scrive del peccato che odia. Entrambi dicono la cosa giusta, perché preferirebbero non dire nulla del tutto.
IL RITORNO DELLA FILOSOFIA—PERCHÉ?
La miglior ragione per un ritorno della filosofia è che, a meno che un uomo non abbia una filosofia, gli capiteranno certe cose orribili. Sarà pratico; sarà progressista; coltiverà l’efficienza; confiderà nell’evoluzione; farà il lavoro che gli sta più a portata di mano; si dedicherà ai fatti, non alle parole. Così, abbattuto colpo dopo colpo da una cieca stupidità e da un fato casuale, andrà barcollando verso una misera morte senza altro conforto che una serie di frasi fatte; come quelle che ho catalogato più sopra. Quelle cose sono semplicemente surrogati del pensiero. In certi casi sono i cenci e le code del pensiero di qualcun altro. Ciò significa che un uomo il quale rifiuta di avere una propria filosofia non avrà nemmeno i vantaggi di una bestia bruta, lasciata ai propri istinti. Avrà soltanto gli avanzi consumati della filosofia di qualcun altro; che le bestie non sono costrette a ereditare; donde la loro felicità. Gli uomini hanno sempre una di due cose: o una filosofia completa e consapevole, o l’accettazione inconsapevole dei frammenti spezzati di una qualche filosofia incompleta e infranta e spesso screditata. Tali frammenti spezzati sono le frasi che ho citato: efficienza ed evoluzione e il resto. L’idea di essere «pratici», presa così da sola, è tutto ciò che rimane di un Pragmatismo che non sta affatto in piedi. È impossibile essere pratici senza un Pragma. E che cosa succederebbe se andaste dal primo uomo pratico che incontrate e diceste a quel povero caro vecchio babbeo: «Dov’è il vostro Pragma?». Fare il lavoro che sta più a portata di mano è un’ovvia insensatezza; eppure è stato ripetuto in molti album. In nove casi su dieci significherebbe fare il lavoro che siamo meno adatti a fare, come pulire i vetri o mollare una botta in testa al poliziotto. «Fatti, non parole» è di per sé un eccellente esempio di «Parole, non pensieri». È un fatto gettare un ciottolo in uno stagno ed è una parola quella che manda un prigioniero alla forca. Ma vi sono certamente parole assai futili; e questa specie di filosofia giornalistica e di scienza popolare consiste quasi interamente di esse.
Some people fear that philosophy will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long words, but a tangle of complicated notions. These people miss the whole point of the modern situation. These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly for want of a philosophy. The politicians and the papers are always using long words. It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong. The political and social relations are already hopelessly complicated. They are far more complicated than any page of medieval metaphysics; the only difference is that the medievalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and the moderns cannot. The chief practical things of today, like finance and political corruption, are frightfully complicated. We are content to tolerate them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them. The business world needs metaphysics—to simplify it.
I know these words will be received with scorn, and with gruff reassertion that this is no time for nonsense and paradox; and that what is really wanted is a practical man to go in and clear up the mess. And a practical man will doubtless appear, one of the unending succession of practical men; and he will doubtless go in, and perhaps clear up a few millions for himself and leave the mess more bewildering than before; as each of the other practical men has done. The reason is perfectly simple. This sort of rather crude and unconscious person always adds to the confusion; because he himself has two or three different motives at the same moment, and does not distinguish between them. A man has, already entangled hopelessly in his own mind, (1) a hearty and human desire for money, (2) a somewhat priggish and superficial desire to be progressing, or going the way the world is going, (3) a dislike to being thought too old to keep up with the young people, (4) a certain amount of vague but genuine patriotism or public spirit, (5) a misunderstanding of a mistake made by Mr. H. G. Wells, in the form of a book on Evolution. When a man has all these things in his head, and does not even attempt to sort them out, he is called by common consent and acclamation a practical man. But the practical man cannot be expected to improve the impracticable muddle; for he cannot clear up the muddle in his own mind, let alone in his own highly complex community and civilisation. For some strange reason, it is the custom to say of this sort of practical man that “he knows his own mind”. Of course this is exactly what he does not know. He may in a few fortunate cases know what he wants, as does a dog or a baby of two years old; but even then he does not know why he wants it. And it is the why and the how that have to be considered when we are tracing out the way in which some culture or tradition has got into a tangle. What we need, as the ancients understood, is not a politician who is a business man, but a king who is a philosopher.
I apologise for the word “king”, which is not strictly necessary to the sense; but I suggest that it would be one of the functions of the philosopher to pause upon such words, and determine their importance and unimportance. The Roman Republic and all its citizens had to the last a horror of the word “king”. It was in consequence of this that they invented and imposed on us the word “Emperor”. The great Republicans who founded America also had a horror of the word “king”; which has therefore reappeared with the special qualification of a Steel King, an Oil King, a Pork King, or other similar monarchs made of similar materials. The business of the philosopher is not necessarily to condemn the innovation or to deny the distinction. But it is his duty to ask himself exactly what it is that he or others dislike in the word “king”. If what he dislikes is a man wearing the spotted fur of a small animal called the ermine, or a man having once had a metal ring placed on the top of his head by a clergyman, he will decide one way. If what he dislikes is a man having vast or irresponsible powers over other men, he may decide another. If what he dislikes is such fur or such power being handed on from father to son, he will enquire whether this ever occurs under commercial conditions today. But, anyhow, he will have the habit of testing the thing by the thought; by the idea which he likes or dislikes; and not merely by the sound of a syllable or the look of four letters beginning with an “R”.
Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today. But man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.
I will take one example out of a thousand that might be taken. What is the attitude of an ordinary man on being told of an extraordinary event: a miracle? I mean the sort of thing that is loosely called supernatural, but should more properly be called preternatural. For the word supernatural applies only to what is higher than man; and a good many modern miracles look as if they came from what is considerably lower. Anyhow, what do modern men say when apparently confronted with something that cannot, in the cant phrase, be naturally explained? Well, most modern men immediately talk nonsense. When such a thing is currently mentioned, in novels or newspapers or magazine stories, the first comment is always something like, “But my dear fellow, this is the twentieth century!” It is worth having a little training in philosophy if only to avoid looking so ghastly a fool as that. It has on the whole rather less sense or meaning than saying, “But my dear fellow, this is Tuesday afternoon.” If miracles cannot happen, they cannot happen in the twentieth century or in the twelfth. If they can happen, nobody can prove that there is a time when they cannot happen. The best that can be said for the sceptic is that he cannot say what he means, and therefore, whatever else he means, he cannot mean what he says. But if he only means that miracles can be believed in the twelfth century, but cannot be believed in the twentieth, then he is wrong again, both in theory and in fact. He is wrong in theory, because an intelligent recognition of possibilities does not depend on a date but on a philosophy. An atheist could disbelieve in the first century and a mystic could continue to believe in the twenty-first century. And he is wrong, in fact, because there is every sign of there being a great deal of mysticism and miracle in the twenty-first century; and there is quite certainly an increasing mass of it in the twentieth.
Alcuni temono che la filosofia li annoierà o li confonderà; perché pensano che sia non solo una filza di paroloni, ma un groviglio di nozioni complicate. Costoro mancano del tutto il punto della situazione moderna. Questi sono esattamente i mali che già esistono; per lo più per mancanza di una filosofia. I politici e i giornali usano di continuo paroloni. Non è una consolazione completa che li usino a sproposito. Le relazioni politiche e sociali sono già disperatamente complicate. Sono assai più complicate di qualsiasi pagina di metafisica medievale; la sola differenza è che il medievalista sapeva dipanare il groviglio e seguire le complicazioni; e i moderni non ne sono capaci. Le principali cose pratiche di oggi, come la finanza e la corruzione politica, sono spaventosamente complicate. Ci accontentiamo di tollerarle perché ci accontentiamo di fraintenderle, non di comprenderle. Il mondo degli affari ha bisogno della metafisica—per semplificarsi.
So che queste parole saranno accolte con scherno, e con la burbera riaffermazione che questo non è tempo per sciocchezze e paradossi; e che ciò di cui davvero c’è bisogno è un uomo pratico che entri in scena e metta ordine nel pasticcio. E un uomo pratico apparirà senza dubbio, uno della successione senza fine degli uomini pratici; e senza dubbio entrerà in scena, e forse metterà ordine in qualche milione per sé, e lascerà il pasticcio più intricato di prima; come ha fatto ciascuno degli altri uomini pratici. La ragione è perfettamente semplice. Questa specie di persona piuttosto rozza e inconsapevole aggiunge sempre confusione; perché egli stesso ha due o tre motivi diversi nel medesimo istante, e non li distingue l’uno dall’altro. Un uomo ha, già disperatamente aggrovigliati nella propria mente, (1) un cordiale e umano desiderio di denaro, (2) un desiderio alquanto borioso e superficiale di progredire, o di andare nella direzione in cui va il mondo, (3) l’avversione a essere considerato troppo vecchio per stare al passo coi giovani, (4) una certa dose di vago ma genuino patriottismo o spirito pubblico, (5) un fraintendimento di un errore commesso dal signor H. G. Wells, sotto forma di un libro sull’Evoluzione. Quando un uomo ha tutte queste cose in testa, e non tenta nemmeno di scioglierle e ordinarle, viene chiamato per comune consenso e acclamazione un uomo pratico. Ma non ci si può aspettare che l’uomo pratico migliori il guazzabuglio impraticabile; giacché non sa mettere ordine nel guazzabuglio della propria mente, per non parlare di quello della sua comunità e civiltà, altamente complesse. Per qualche strana ragione, di questa specie di uomo pratico è costume dire che «egli sa quel che vuole». Naturalmente è proprio questo ciò che egli non sa. In pochi casi fortunati potrà sapere che cosa vuole, come lo sa un cane o un bimbo di due anni; ma anche allora non sa perché lo vuole. Ed è il perché e il come che vanno considerati quando cerchiamo di rintracciare il modo in cui una cultura o una tradizione si è aggrovigliata. Ciò di cui abbiamo bisogno, come compresero gli antichi, non è un politico che sia un uomo d’affari, ma un re che sia filosofo.
Mi scuso per la parola «re», che non è strettamente necessaria al senso; ma suggerisco che sarebbe una delle funzioni del filosofo soffermarsi su tali parole, e determinarne l’importanza e la non importanza. La Repubblica romana e tutti i suoi cittadini ebbero fino all’ultimo l’orrore della parola «re». Fu in conseguenza di ciò che inventarono e ci imposero la parola «Imperatore». Anche i grandi Repubblicani che fondarono l’America ebbero l’orrore della parola «re»; la quale è perciò riapparsa con la speciale qualifica di Re dell’Acciaio, Re del Petrolio, Re del Maiale, o di altri simili monarchi fatti di simili materie. Il compito del filosofo non è necessariamente condannare l’innovazione o negare la distinzione. Ma è suo dovere chiedersi esattamente che cosa sia ciò che egli o gli altri detestano nella parola «re». Se ciò che detesta è un uomo che porta la pelliccia screziata di un piccolo animale chiamato ermellino, o un uomo cui una volta un ecclesiastico ha posato un anello di metallo in cima al capo, deciderà in un modo. Se ciò che detesta è un uomo che ha poteri vasti o irresponsabili su altri uomini, potrà decidere in un altro. Se ciò che detesta è che tale pelliccia o tale potere vengano tramandati di padre in figlio, si domanderà se ciò avvenga mai, oggi, in condizioni commerciali. Ma, comunque sia, avrà l’abitudine di saggiare la cosa col pensiero; con l’idea che gli piace o gli dispiace; e non semplicemente col suono di una sillaba o con l’aspetto di quattro lettere che cominciano con una «R».
La filosofia è semplicemente il pensiero che è stato pensato fino in fondo. È spesso una gran noia. Ma l’uomo non ha alternativa, se non tra l’essere influenzato da un pensiero che è stato pensato fino in fondo e l’essere influenzato da un pensiero che non è stato pensato fino in fondo. Quest’ultimo è ciò che oggi comunemente chiamiamo cultura e illuminismo. Ma l’uomo è sempre influenzato da un pensiero di qualche specie, il proprio o quello di qualcun altro; quello di qualcuno di cui si fida o quello di qualcuno di cui non ha mai sentito parlare, pensiero di prima, seconda o terza mano; pensiero tratto da leggende esplose o da voci non verificate; ma sempre qualcosa con l’ombra di un sistema di valori e di una ragione di preferenza. Un uomo saggia ogni cosa con qualcosa. La questione, qui, è se egli abbia mai saggiato il suo metro di saggio.
Prenderò un esempio fra i mille che si potrebbero prendere. Qual è l’atteggiamento di un uomo comune quando gli si narra di un evento straordinario: un miracolo? Intendo quel genere di cosa che vagamente si dice soprannaturale, ma che più propriamente andrebbe detta prenaturale. Giacché la parola soprannaturale si applica soltanto a ciò che è più alto dell’uomo; e un buon numero di miracoli moderni ha l’aria di venire da ciò che è considerevolmente più basso. In ogni caso, che cosa dicono gli uomini moderni quando si trovano apparentemente di fronte a qualcosa che non può, per usare la frase fatta, essere spiegato naturalmente? Ebbene, la maggior parte degli uomini moderni comincia immediatamente a dire sciocchezze. Quando una cosa simile viene menzionata di corrente, nei romanzi o nei giornali o nelle novelle da rivista, il primo commento è sempre qualcosa come: «Ma, caro mio, siamo nel ventesimo secolo!». Vale la pena di avere un po’ di allenamento in filosofia, non foss’altro che per evitare di fare uno sciocco così spettrale come quello. Nel complesso, ha piuttosto meno senso o significato che dire: «Ma, caro mio, è martedì pomeriggio». Se i miracoli non possono accadere, non possono accadere nel ventesimo secolo come nel dodicesimo. Se possono accadere, nessuno può provare che vi sia un tempo in cui non possano accadere. Il meglio che si possa dire dello scettico è che non sa dire ciò che intende, e perciò, qualunque altra cosa intenda, non può intendere ciò che dice. Ma se intende soltanto che si poteva credere ai miracoli nel dodicesimo secolo, ma non vi si può credere nel ventesimo, allora ha di nuovo torto, sia in teoria sia in fatto. Ha torto in teoria, perché un’intelligente riconoscenza delle possibilità non dipende da una data, ma da una filosofia. Un ateo poteva non credere nel primo secolo e un mistico potrebbe continuare a credere nel ventunesimo secolo. E ha torto, in fatto, perché tutto lascia presagire che vi sarà una gran quantità di misticismo e di miracolo nel ventunesimo secolo; e ve n’è quasi certamente una massa crescente nel ventesimo.
But I have only taken that first superficial repartee because there is a significance in the mere fact that it comes first; and its very superficiality reveals something of the subconsciousness. It is almost an automatic repartee; and automatic words are of some importance in psychology. Let us not be too severe on the worthy gentleman who informs his dear fellow that it is the twentieth century. In the mysterious depths of his being even that enormous ass does actually mean something. The point is that he cannot really explain what he means; and that is the argument for a better education in philosophy. What he really means is something like this, “There is a theory of this mysterious universe to which more and more people were in fact inclined during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries; and up to that point at least, this theory did grow with the growing inventions and discoveries of science to which we owe our present social organisation— or disorganisation. That theory maintains that cause and effect have from the first operated in an uninterrupted sequence like a fixed fate; and that there is no will behind or within that fate; so that it must work itself out in the absence of such a will, as a machine must run down in the absence of a man. There were more people in the nineteenth century than in the ninth who happened to hold this particular theory of the universe. I myself happened to hold it; and therefore I obviously cannot believe in miracles.” That is perfectly good sense; but so is the counter-statement; “I do not happen to hold it; and therefore I obviously can believe in miracles.”
The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, “Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process.” The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish. He will then go off and say: “One can’t have such things in the twentieth century”; which really is gibberish. Yet the former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms. If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he dies. But he is not justified in saying that it cannot run uphill, until he really knows why it runs downhill. To say it does so by gravitation answers the physical but not the philosophical question. It only repeats that there is a repetition; it does not touch the deeper question of whether that repetition could be altered by anything outside it. And that depends on whether there is anything outside it. For instance, suppose that a man had only seen the river in a dream. He might have seen it in a hundred dreams, always repeating itself and always running downhill. But that would not prevent the hundredth dream being different and the river climbing the mountain; because the dream is a dream, and there is something outside it. Mere repetition does not prove reality or inevitability. We must know the nature of the thing and the cause of the repetition. If the nature of the thing is a Creation, and the cause of the thing a Creator, in other words if the repetition itself is only the repetition of something willed by a person, then it is not impossible for the same person to will a different thing. If a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing in a miracle; but not otherwise. Otherwise, he is simply a philosopher who is consistent in his philosophy.
A modern man is quite free to choose either philosophy. But what is actually the matter with the modern man is that he does not know even his own philosophy; but only his own phraseology. He can only answer the next spiritual message produced by a spiritualist, or the next cure attested by doctors at Lourdes, by repeating what are generally nothing but phrases; or are, at their best, prejudices.
Thus, when so brilliant a man as Mr. H. G. Wells says that such supernatural ideas have become impossible “for intelligent people”, he is (for that instant) not talking like an intelligent person. In other words, he is not talking like a philosopher; because he is not even saying what he means. What he means is, not “impossible for intelligent men”, but, “impossible for intelligent monists”, or, “impossible for intelligent determinists”. But it is not a negation of intelligence to hold any coherent and logical conception of so mysterious a world. It is not a negation of intelligence to think that all experience is a dream. It is not unintelligent to think it a delusion, as some Buddhists do; let alone to think it a product of creative will, as Christians do. We are always being told that men must no longer be so sharply divided into their different religions. As an immediate step in progress, it is much more urgent that they should be more clearly and more sharply divided into their different philosophies.
Ma ho preso quella prima rimbeccata superficiale solo perché c’è un significato nel semplice fatto che venga per prima; e la sua stessa superficialità rivela qualcosa del subconscio. È quasi una rimbeccata automatica; e le parole automatiche hanno una certa importanza in psicologia. Non siamo troppo severi col degno signore che informa il suo caro amico di essere nel ventesimo secolo. Nelle misteriose profondità del suo essere, perfino quell’enorme asino intende davvero qualcosa. Il punto è che non sa realmente spiegare ciò che intende; e questo è l’argomento in favore di una migliore educazione alla filosofia. Ciò che egli realmente intende è qualcosa di simile a questo: «C’è una teoria di questo misterioso universo verso la quale sempre più persone furono, di fatto, inclini durante la seconda metà del diciottesimo e la prima metà del diciannovesimo secolo; e almeno fino a quel punto questa teoria crebbe insieme alle invenzioni e alle scoperte crescenti della scienza cui dobbiamo la nostra attuale organizzazione sociale—o disorganizzazione. Quella teoria sostiene che causa ed effetto abbiano operato fin dal principio in una sequenza ininterrotta come un fato fisso; e che non vi sia alcuna volontà dietro o dentro quel fato; sicché esso deve svolgersi da sé in assenza di una tale volontà, come una macchina deve scaricarsi in assenza di un uomo. C’erano più persone nel diciannovesimo secolo che nel nono che si trovavano a professare questa particolare teoria dell’universo. Io stesso mi trovavo a professarla; e perciò, evidentemente, non posso credere ai miracoli». Questo è ottimo buon senso; ma lo è anche l’affermazione contraria: «Io non mi trovo a professarla; e perciò, evidentemente, posso credere ai miracoli».
Il vantaggio di un’elementare abitudine filosofica è che permette a un uomo, per esempio, di comprendere un’affermazione come questa: «Che possano o non possano esserci eccezioni a un processo dipende dalla natura di quel processo». Lo svantaggio di non averla è che un uomo si distoglierà con impazienza perfino da un truismo tanto semplice; e lo chiamerà farneticazione metafisica. Se ne andrà poi a dire: «Non si possono avere cose simili nel ventesimo secolo»; il che sì che è farneticazione. Eppure la prima affermazione potrebbe di certo essergli spiegata in termini abbastanza semplici. Se un uomo vede un fiume scorrere in giù giorno dopo giorno e anno dopo anno, è giustificato a calcolare, potremmo dire a scommettere, che così farà fino a che egli muoia. Ma non è giustificato a dire che esso non può scorrere in su, finché non sappia davvero perché scorre in giù. Dire che lo fa per gravitazione risponde alla domanda fisica ma non a quella filosofica. Ripete soltanto che c’è una ripetizione; non tocca la domanda più profonda, se cioè quella ripetizione potrebbe essere alterata da qualcosa al di fuori di essa. E ciò dipende dal fatto che vi sia qualcosa al di fuori di essa. Per esempio, supponiamo che un uomo abbia visto il fiume soltanto in sogno. Potrebbe averlo visto in un centinaio di sogni, sempre ripetentesi e sempre scorrente in giù. Ma ciò non impedirebbe al centesimo sogno di essere diverso e al fiume di arrampicarsi sulla montagna; perché il sogno è un sogno, e c’è qualcosa al di fuori di esso. La mera ripetizione non prova la realtà né l’inevitabilità. Dobbiamo conoscere la natura della cosa e la causa della ripetizione. Se la natura della cosa è una Creazione, e la causa della cosa un Creatore, in altre parole se la ripetizione stessa non è che la ripetizione di qualcosa voluto da una persona, allora non è impossibile che la medesima persona voglia una cosa diversa. Se un uomo è uno sciocco a credere in un Creatore, allora è uno sciocco a credere in un miracolo; ma non altrimenti. Altrimenti, è semplicemente un filosofo coerente con la propria filosofia.
Un uomo moderno è del tutto libero di scegliere l’una o l’altra filosofia. Ma ciò che c’è di realmente sbagliato nell’uomo moderno è che egli non conosce nemmeno la propria filosofia; ma soltanto la propria fraseologia. Non sa rispondere al prossimo messaggio spirituale prodotto da uno spiritista, o alla prossima guarigione attestata dai medici a Lourdes, se non ripetendo quelle che generalmente non sono altro che frasi; o, nel migliore dei casi, pregiudizi.
Così, quando un uomo brillante come il signor H. G. Wells dice che tali idee soprannaturali sono divenute impossibili «per le persone intelligenti», egli (in quell’istante) non sta parlando come una persona intelligente. In altre parole, non sta parlando da filosofo; perché non sta nemmeno dicendo ciò che intende. Ciò che intende è, non «impossibili per gli uomini intelligenti», ma «impossibili per i monisti intelligenti», oppure «impossibili per i deterministi intelligenti». Ma non è una negazione dell’intelligenza avere una qualsiasi concezione coerente e logica di un mondo tanto misterioso. Non è una negazione dell’intelligenza pensare che ogni esperienza sia un sogno. Non è privo di intelligenza pensare che sia un’illusione, come pensano alcuni buddisti; per non parlare del pensare che sia un prodotto di una volontà creatrice, come pensano i cristiani. Ci vien detto di continuo che gli uomini non devono più essere divisi tanto nettamente nelle loro diverse religioni. Come immediato passo di progresso, è assai più urgente che essi siano divisi più chiaramente e più nettamente nelle loro diverse filosofie.
VANDALISM
Vandalism is of two kinds, the negative and the positive; as in the Vandals of the ancient world, who destroyed buildings, and the Vandals of the modern world, who erect them. A long procession of those typically modern thinkers, who are too tired to think, has already left behind a trail or tradition of language; by which it is vaguely suggested that whatever is constructive is good and only what is destructive is bad. Anyone wishing to lose himself in mazes of such logic, or rather illogicality, may put to himself some particular proposition; as that it is good to construct a stake, with faggots, for burning a man alive, and yet bad to destroy a growing plantation or cut down trees, which is the only possible way of doing it. But in the particular case of Vandalism, it is very specially necessary to remember that the real argument is all the other way. Of two bad things, it is better to be the barbarian who destroys something, which for some reason he dislikes or does not understand, and who may yet sincerely like other things that he does understand, rather than to be the vulgarian who erects something exactly expressive of what he likes; and in that act rears a colossal image of the smallness of his soul. Destructive Vandalism, though a very great evil at the present time, and indeed through all history, has not been in all history so bad as it is now; and certainly not so bad as many more constructive things that exist now.
It is important to remember that there are two kinds of mere destructiveness; neither on the noblest level of human culture, but neither on the most ignoble. First, of course, the Vandal may be the Iconoclast. He may destroy certain artistic creations because they are really opposed to his moral convictions. Thus a Puritan fanatic from America might conceivably think himself commanded by the Lord to dynamite Westminster Abbey, because it is full of idols; that is of images with a religious character. Curiously enough, he would be half right. It is full of idols; but they are not images of a religious character. Anybody can see at a glance that medieval figures of saints and angels are not worshipped; for the perfectly simple reason that they are themselves represented in the act of worshipping. But the eighteenth-century statues of statesmen and generals really are idols. They are manifestly set up, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of the men there represented; who are to be directly worshipped for their own sake; as the Pagans worshipped demigods and heroes. Lord Polkerton and Admiral Bangs are not themselves represented in the act of worshipping; but in the act of being worshipped. For the eighteenth century, which has been called the Age of Reason, was the real Age of Idolatry. This, however, is a parenthesis. The point is that the American fanatic would be a much finer fellow than the American chain-store man who finds half London in the chains of his cheap and tawdry stores. If the dynamite of the Iconoclast caved in the whole front of Westminster Abbey, I should be far less horrified than I am at a project of a Yankee shopkeeper for building a tower with bells, taller than Westminster Cathedral. It is curious to reflect on the few stray nerves of criticism and sensibility that still remain. I fancy that if an American erected immediately opposite Windsor Castle, on the other side of the river, another castle of exactly the same castellated form and plan, only a little bigger (being made of cheap and rotten material) and then flew the flag of his own ancient family in direct defiance of the personal flag of the King, there would be a good many people in society who would tell the American, however rich he was, that this was going a bit too far. Which shows how much safer it is to insult religion than to insult royalty.
Secondly, in the great moral philosophy of being fair to Vandals, we must remember that there is a certain element in life which has even a right to its place in life, though that place may not always be easy to find, without displacing better things. We talk of positive and negative, of creation and destruction; but in a sense the association is incorrect. Destruction is not negation; at least it is not always and of necessity negation. There is a positive pleasure in destruction, which can be harmless and is certainly real. It is innocent, for it is felt strongly by children when they first tear up paper or break sticks. But I trust that few of us have so entirely lost our innocence, as to be unable to drink deep joy from smashing up the happy home. Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he has never, when standing in a respectable parlour, felt a wild desire to seize a pot and plant and send it crashing through the bow windows into the front-garden or the street? These things are not entirely to be sterilised; these things also are from God. It is all explained in a ballade which my friends and I composed years ago, after I had shattered a great tumbler all over the carpet. It has the refrain: “I like the noise of breaking glass.” And though I should not like the glass of Chartres Cathedral to be broken merely to gratify this taste, I can imagine two types of human beings who might break it and remain human. A lunatic might do it because he thought it unChristian to make pictures of the life of Christ; and a boy might do it because he liked the noise of breaking glass. So much for the defence of the more dignified Vandal—the Destroyer.
But the new sort of Vandal is much more indefensible. The crude creative Vandal is much more of a pestilence and a peril. There is more to be said for the conqueror, who makes a solitude and calls it peace, than for the other who makes a pandemonium and calls it progress. For he brands upon the eye in memory the positive and vivid picture of his own meanness and stupidity. The barbarians who laid waste the world may have prevailed in so far that some good things were forgotten, but they did not insist that their own base and barbarous things should be remembered. But that is exactly what the “constructive” vulgarian does. That is exactly what the Modern Vandal does. It is a gloomy pleasure to think that if a dissolving civilisation brings in forces more like those of the Ancient Vandals, if vagabond tribes from Asia or Eastern Europe drift in with the old-world, animal, almost automatic destructiveness of the Huns or the Bashi-Bazouks, they at least will wreck and ruin all the new Civilisation without any pretence of reconstructing it; and that towering and glaring flats, or long leagues of flashy glass shop-windows, will lie in rubbish-heaps side by side with better things.
VANDALISMO
Il vandalismo è di due specie, quello negativo e quello positivo; come nei Vandali del mondo antico, che distruggevano gli edifici, e nei Vandali del mondo moderno, che li erigono. Una lunga processione di quei pensatori tipicamente moderni, troppo stanchi per pensare, ha già lasciato dietro di sé una scia, o tradizione, di linguaggio; per cui si insinua vagamente che tutto ciò che è costruttivo sia buono e che solo ciò che è distruttivo sia cattivo. Chiunque desideri perdersi nei labirinti di una simile logica, o piuttosto illogicità, potrà proporsi qualche particolare proposizione; per esempio che sia bene costruire un palo, con le fascine, per bruciare vivo un uomo, e tuttavia male abbattere una piantagione in crescita o tagliare gli alberi, che è l’unico modo possibile di farlo. Ma nel caso particolare del Vandalismo è quanto mai necessario ricordare che il vero argomento è tutto dalla parte opposta. Fra due cose cattive, è meglio essere il barbaro che distrugge qualcosa che, per qualche ragione, gli è sgradito o non comprende, e che pure può amare sinceramente altre cose che comprende, piuttosto che il volgare che erige qualcosa di perfettamente espressivo di ciò che gli piace; e in quell’atto innalza un’immagine colossale della piccolezza della propria anima. Il Vandalismo distruttivo, pur essendo un grandissimo male nel tempo presente, e in verità in tutta la storia, non è mai stato in tutta la storia così cattivo come lo è ora; e certamente non così cattivo come molte cose ben più costruttive che oggi esistono.
È importante ricordare che vi sono due specie di semplice distruttività; nessuna delle due sul livello più nobile della cultura umana, ma nessuna delle due nemmeno sul più ignobile. Anzitutto, naturalmente, il Vandalo può essere l’Iconoclasta. Egli può distruggere certe creazioni artistiche perché esse si oppongono realmente alle sue convinzioni morali. Così un fanatico puritano d’America potrebbe magari credersi comandato dal Signore a far saltare in aria l’Abbazia di Westminster, perché è piena di idoli; cioè di immagini di carattere religioso. Cosa abbastanza curiosa, avrebbe ragione a metà. È piena di idoli; ma questi non sono immagini di carattere religioso. Chiunque può vedere a colpo d’occhio che le figure medievali di santi e di angeli non sono adorate; per la ragione perfettamente semplice che esse stesse sono rappresentate nell’atto di adorare. Ma le statue settecentesche di uomini di stato e di generali sono davvero idoli. Sono manifestamente erette non alla gloria di Dio, ma alla gloria degli uomini ivi rappresentati; i quali vanno adorati direttamente per se stessi, come i Pagani adoravano i semidei e gli eroi. Lord Polkerton e l’Ammiraglio Bangs non sono rappresentati nell’atto di adorare, bensì nell’atto di essere adorati. Poiché il diciottesimo secolo, che è stato chiamato l’Età della Ragione, fu la vera Età dell’Idolatria. Questa, tuttavia, è una parentesi. Il punto è che il fanatico americano sarebbe un individuo assai più nobile del padrone americano di grandi magazzini a catena, che avvince mezza Londra alle catene dei suoi negozi vili e pacchiani. Se la dinamite dell’Iconoclasta sfondasse tutta la facciata dell’Abbazia di Westminster, ne sarei assai meno inorridito di quanto lo sia dinanzi al progetto di un bottegaio yankee di costruire una torre con campane, più alta della Cattedrale di Westminster. È curioso riflettere sui pochi nervi sparsi di critica e di sensibilità che ancora sopravvivono. Immagino che se un americano erigesse, proprio di fronte al Castello di Windsor, sull’altra sponda del fiume, un altro castello di forma e pianta esattamente merlate allo stesso modo, solo un poco più grande (essendo fatto di materiale vile e marcio), e poi vi issasse la bandiera della propria antica famiglia in diretta sfida alla bandiera personale del Re, si troverebbero parecchie persone in società a dire all’americano, per quanto ricco fosse, che questo era spingersi un po’ troppo oltre. Il che mostra quanto sia più sicuro insultare la religione che insultare la regalità.
In secondo luogo, nella grande filosofia morale dell’essere giusti verso i Vandali, dobbiamo ricordare che vi è nella vita un certo elemento che ha persino un diritto al proprio posto nella vita, benché quel posto non sia sempre facile da trovare senza spodestare cose migliori. Parliamo di positivo e negativo, di creazione e distruzione; ma in un certo senso l’associazione è scorretta. La distruzione non è negazione; o almeno non è sempre e necessariamente negazione. Vi è un piacere positivo nella distruzione, che può essere innocuo ed è certamente reale. Esso è innocente, poiché è sentito fortemente dai bambini quando per la prima volta strappano la carta o spezzano i bastoncini. Ma confido che pochi di noi abbiano così interamente perduto la propria innocenza da essere incapaci di attingere gioia profonda dal mandare in frantumi la felice casa. Respira forse un uomo dall’anima tanto morta da non aver mai, standosene in un rispettabile salotto, provato un selvaggio desiderio di afferrare un vaso con la sua pianta e scagliarlo con fracasso attraverso le vetrate a bovindo nel giardino antistante o sulla strada? Queste cose non vanno interamente sterilizzate; anche queste cose vengono da Dio. È tutto spiegato in una ballata che i miei amici ed io componemmo anni fa, dopo che ebbi mandato in frantumi un grande bicchierone su tutto il tappeto. Ha per ritornello: «Mi piace il rumore del vetro che si rompe.» E per quanto non mi piacerebbe che le vetrate della Cattedrale di Chartres fossero infrante solo per soddisfare questo gusto, posso immaginare due tipi di esseri umani che potrebbero infrangerle rimanendo umani. Un pazzo potrebbe farlo perché ritiene anticristiano fare immagini della vita di Cristo; e un ragazzo potrebbe farlo perché gli piace il rumore del vetro che si rompe. Tanto basti in difesa del più dignitoso Vandalo: il Distruttore.
Ma la nuova specie di Vandalo è assai più indifendibile. Il rozzo Vandalo creativo è assai più una pestilenza e un pericolo. Vi è più da dire a favore del conquistatore, che fa una solitudine e la chiama pace, che a favore dell’altro, che fa un pandemonio e lo chiama progresso. Poiché egli marchia sull’occhio, nella memoria, l’immagine positiva e vivida della propria meschinità e stupidità. I barbari che devastarono il mondo poterono forse prevalere al punto che alcune cose buone furono dimenticate, ma non pretesero che le loro proprie cose vili e barbare fossero ricordate. Ma è esattamente ciò che fa il volgare «costruttivo». È esattamente ciò che fa il Vandalo Moderno. È un cupo piacere pensare che se una civiltà in dissoluzione porterà con sé forze più simili a quelle degli antichi Vandali, se tribù vagabonde dall’Asia o dall’Europa orientale piomberanno con l’antica, animalesca, quasi automatica distruttività degli Unni o dei Bashi-Bazouk, esse almeno faranno scempio e rovina di tutta la nuova Civiltà senza alcuna pretesa di ricostruirla; e che i palazzi torreggianti e sgargianti, o le lunghe leghe di vistose vetrine di negozi, giaceranno in cumuli di macerie fianco a fianco con cose migliori.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is more remarkable about Mrs. Browning’s work than the absence of that trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad, it is bad from some extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, she is far more a great poet than she is a good one.
Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite abandoning the world. Such a couplet as—
Our Euripides, the human, With his dropping of warm tears.
gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with a loud splash, and Mrs. Browning coming after him with a thermometer. But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs. Hemans would never have written it. She would have written something perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs. Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it. She had that catastrophic and public failure which is as much as a medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.
In spite of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Any one who has tried to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve, as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense. Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare, that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit:
And the eyes of the peacock fans Winked at the alien glory,
she said of the Papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolour.
And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble. And the shadow of a monarch’s crown is softened in her hair,
is her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of peacock feathers winking like so many London urchins is perhaps one of her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a woman’s hair as the softened shadow of a crown is a singularly vivid and perfect one. But both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs. Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic, irrevocable, and big with coming events, so every one of her wild weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a certain effect on the imagination, which has for good or evil become part and parcel of our mental vision for ever. She gives the reader the impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentlemen of the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell it was always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the leap.
“Casa Guidi Windows” is, in one aspect, a poem very typical of its author. Mrs. Browning may fairly be called the peculiar poet of Liberalism, of that great movement of the first half of the nineteenth century towards the emancipation of men from ancient institutions which had gradually changed their nature, from the houses of refuge which had turned into dungeons, and the mystic jewels which remained only as letters. It was not what we ordinarily understand by revolt. It had no hatred in its heart for ancient and essentially human institutions. It had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy. Their ideal, like the ideal of all sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April, and regiments being cut to pieces for a flag. They were neither Radicals nor Socialists, but Liberals, and a liberal is a noble and indispensable lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.
Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals. Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious revolutions. He could follow the medieval logicians in all their sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true revolutionist; for all true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an idiot. For how could a man even wish for something which he had never heard of? Mrs. Browning’s inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason, which it is difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction exist. Men whose lives are mainly based upon friendship sympathise with the friendships of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other is a proverb, and like many other proverbs sometimes a nuisance. In patriotism alone it is considered correct just now to assume that the sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great Liberals of Mrs. Browning’s time. The Brownings had, so to speak, a disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England and they loved Italy; yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitans. They loved the two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe. They had hold of the root and essence of patriotism. They knew how certain flowers and birds and rivers pass into the mills of the brain and come out as wars and discoveries, and how some triumphant adventure or some staggering crime wrought in a remote continent may bear about it the colour of an Italian city or the soul of a silent village of Surrey.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
La signora Browning fu una grande poeta, e non, come oziosamente e volgarmente si crede, soltanto una grande poetessa. La parola «poetessa» è cattivo inglese, e reca con sé un complimento particolarmente cattivo. Nulla vi è di più notevole nell’opera della signora Browning quanto l’assenza di quella trita e sdolcinata eleganza che gli ultimi due secoli esigevano dalle scrittrici. Ovunque il suo verso sia cattivo, lo è per qualche stravaganza d’immagine, qualche violenza di paragone, qualche sorta di sbornia di ingegno. Le sue insensatezze non nascono mai da debolezza, ma da una confusione di facoltà. Se la frase si spiega da sé, ella è assai più una grande poeta che non una buona poeta.
La signora Browning appare spesso più lussureggiante e sentimentale di molte altre donne di lettere, ma ciò accadeva perché era più forte. Occorre una certa dose di forza interiore per crollare. Una completa autoumiliazione richiede una forza enorme, più forza di quanta la maggior parte di noi ne possieda. Quando scriveva la poesia dell’abbandono di sé, ella davvero si abbandonava con il valore e la decisione di un anacoreta che rinuncia al mondo. Un distico come questo—
Il nostro Euripide, l’umano, Con il suo stillare di calde lacrime.
suscita nella maggior parte di noi una sensazione stucchevole e nauseante. Nulla si può bene concepire di più ridicolo di Euripide che se ne va in giro lasciando cadere lacrime con un rumoroso tonfo, e la signora Browning che gli tien dietro con un termometro. Ma il punto emblematico di questo distico idiota è che la signora Hemans non l’avrebbe mai scritto. Ella avrebbe scritto qualcosa di perfettamente dignitoso, perfettamente innocuo, perfettamente trascurabile. La signora Browning si trovava in una difficoltà grande e seria. Voleva davvero dire qualcosa. Mirava a un’immagine viva e curiosa, e la mancò. Ebbe quella catastrofica e pubblica sconfitta che vale quanto una medaglia o un attestato, il distintivo dei coraggiosi.
Malgrado la noiosa mezza verità che l’arte sia amorale, le arti richiedono un certo considerevole numero di qualità morali, e più d’ogni altra cosa tutte le arti richiedono coraggio. L’arte del disegno, per esempio, richiede persino una specie di coraggio fisico. Chiunque abbia tentato di tracciare una linea retta e vi abbia fallito sa che fallisce soprattutto nel nervo, come potrebbe fallire nel gettarsi da una rupe. E similmente ogni grande arte letteraria implica l’elemento del rischio, e i più grandi artisti della parola sono stati comunemente coloro che hanno corso il maggior rischio di dire sciocchezze. Quasi tutti i grandi poeti sragionano, da Shakespeare in giù. La signora Browning era elisabettiana nella sua lussureggiante esuberanza e nella sua audacia, e nella scala gigantesca del suo ingegno. Con lei proviamo spesso ciò che proviamo con Shakespeare, che avrebbe fatto meglio con la metà del talento. La grande maledizione degli elisabettiani grava su di lei: che non sa lasciare nulla in pace, non sa scrivere un solo verso senza un concettismo:
E gli occhi dei ventagli di pavone Ammiccavano all’estranea gloria,
diceva ella dei ventagli papali al cospetto del tricolore italiano.
E un sangue regale manda lampi su per il suo occhio principesco a turbare. E l’ombra di una corona di monarca s’addolcisce nei suoi capelli,
è la sua descrizione di una dama bella e aristocratica. L’idea delle piume di pavone che ammiccano come tanti monelli di Londra è forse una delle sue figure retoriche piuttosto aggressive e oltraggiose. L’immagine dei capelli di una donna come l’ombra addolcita di una corona è singolarmente viva e perfetta. Ma entrambe hanno la medesima qualità di fantasia intellettuale e di concentrazione intellettuale. Sono entrambe esempi di una sorta di epigramma etereo. Questa è la grande e dominante caratteristica della signora Browning: che ella era significativa tanto nella sconfitta quanto nel successo. Come ogni matrimonio al mondo, buono o cattivo, è un matrimonio, drammatico, irrevocabile e gravido di eventi futuri, così ciascuna delle sue selvagge nozze fra idee estranee è un fatto compiuto che produce un certo effetto sull’immaginazione, che nel bene o nel male è divenuto parte integrante della nostra visione mentale per sempre. Ella dà al lettore l’impressione di non aver mai declinato una fantasia, così come certi gentiluomini del Settecento non declinavano mai un duello. Quando cadeva era sempre perché aveva mancato l’appiglio, mai perché avesse temuto il salto.
«Casa Guidi Windows» è, sotto un certo aspetto, un poema assai tipico della sua autrice. La signora Browning può a buon diritto essere chiamata la poeta peculiare del liberalismo, di quel grande movimento della prima metà del secolo diciannovesimo verso l’emancipazione degli uomini da antiche istituzioni che avevano a poco a poco mutato la propria natura, dalle case di rifugio trasformatesi in prigioni, e dai gioielli mistici rimasti soltanto come pegni. Non era ciò che ordinariamente intendiamo per rivolta. Non aveva odio in cuore per le antiche e essenzialmente umane istituzioni. Aveva quella credenza profondamente conservatrice nella più antica delle istituzioni, l’uomo comune, che va sotto il nome di democrazia. Il loro ideale, come l’ideale di tutte le persone assennate, era una nozione caotica e confusa di bontà fatta di primule inglesi e statue greche, di uccelli che cantano in aprile e di reggimenti fatti a pezzi per una bandiera. Non erano né radicali né socialisti, ma liberali, e un liberale è un nobile e indispensabile folle che tenta di fare un cosmo della propria testa.
La signora Browning e suo marito erano più liberali della maggior parte dei liberali. La loro era l’ospitalità dell’intelletto e l’ospitalità del cuore, che è la migliore definizione del termine. Non caddero mai nell’abitudine degli oziosi rivoluzionari di supporre che il passato fosse cattivo perché il futuro era buono, il che equivaleva ad affermare che poiché l’umanità non aveva mai fatto altro che errori, adesso era del tutto certo che avesse ragione. Browning possedeva in grado maggiore di ogni altro uomo il potere di comprendere che tutte le convenzioni non erano altro che rivoluzioni vittoriose. Poteva seguire i logici medievali in tutto il loro seminare vento e mietere tempeste con tutto quel generoso ardore che si deve alle idee astratte. Poteva studiare gli antichi con gli occhi giovani del Rinascimento e leggere una grammatica greca come un libro di liriche d’amore. Questo immenso e quasi sconcertante liberalismo di Browning ebbe indubbiamente qualche effetto sulla moglie. Nella sua visione della Nuova Italia ella risaliva all’immagine dell’Antica Italia come un’onesta e sincera rivoluzionaria; poiché tutte le vere rivoluzioni sono ritorni al naturale e al normale. Un rivoluzionario che rompe col passato è una nozione degna di un idiota. Come potrebbe infatti un uomo desiderare persino qualcosa di cui non ha mai udito parlare? La inesauribile simpatia della signora Browning per tutte le antiche ed essenziali passioni dell’umanità in nessun luogo si manifestava più che nella sua concezione del patriottismo. Per qualche oscura ragione, che è davvero difficile sondare, credere nel patriottismo ai giorni nostri è ritenuto significare principalmente credere che ogni altra nazione debba abbandonare i propri sentimenti patriottici. Per nessun’altra passione esiste questa bizzarra contraddizione. Gli uomini la cui vita si fonda principalmente sull’amicizia simpatizzano con le amicizie altrui. L’interesse reciproco delle coppie di fidanzati è un proverbio, e come molti altri proverbi talvolta una seccatura. Nel patriottismo soltanto si ritiene corretto, proprio ora, presumere che il sentimento non esista negli altri. Non era così con i grandi liberali del tempo della signora Browning. I Browning avevano, per così dire, un talento incorporeo per il patriottismo. Amavano l’Inghilterra e amavano l’Italia; eppure erano l’esatto opposto dei cosmopoliti. Amavano i due paesi in quanto paesi, non come divisioni arbitrarie del globo. Avevano afferrato la radice e l’essenza del patriottismo. Sapevano come certi fiori e uccelli e fiumi passino nei mulini del cervello e ne escano come guerre e scoperte, e come qualche trionfante avventura o qualche sconvolgente delitto compiuto in un remoto continente possa recare con sé il colore di una città italiana o l’anima di un silenzioso villaggio del Surrey.
THE ERASTIAN ON THE ESTABLISHMENT
Dean Inge is so obviously the most acute, the most cultivated and the most individual of the sceptical school which he represents, that there is sometimes inevitably an appearance of singling him out, when the singularity is only due to his own distinction. It is due, if we must put it more roughly, to there being so very few intellectuals of that school who are worth answering. I have often myself, perhaps, put it more roughly than I intended; but the double duty involved presents a problem not easily solved. The trouble is that he is really in such a false position that the true statement of it sounds itself like a taunt. Yet it may not be meant for a taunt, but only for a truth. His own position certainly does not seem as false to him as it does to us; but to excuse it requires a long explanation which is impossible in so short an expression. For instance, he wrote the other day a severe condemnation of those of the Anglican clergy who favour the Disestablishment of the Church of England. It may seem curt to retort, as I should be first inclined to do, that the Dean naturally hesitates to sever the one very slender strip of red tape that still connects him with Christianity. Yet it is quite true; and it is not necessarily merely hostile.
To understand the curious case of Dean Inge, in a spirit of Christian charity, we must leave for the moment all questions of creed and definition and call up another image before the mind. It is the image that was in the mind of Matthew Arnold when he openly said that, being almost an agnostic himself, he yet wished to preserve the institutions of religion, and especially the literature of religion; that he found these best preserved in the Church of England and advised nobody to leave it. We must call up the image of a historic hierarchy of priests who are also professors, and whose main business is scholarship and the study of letters; it was not for nothing that both Arnold and Inge had connections with Oxford. Most of such men would probably be Christian in hereditary sentiment and subject-matter; but their Christianity would not, so to speak, be the point. We can even imagine the institution better if we think of it as a Confucian rather than a Christian foundation. The idea of it is a classical culture that is undisturbed. But it has this further essential point; that if its traditions and rites must be undisturbed, so also must its doubts and negations be undisturbed. It must be so traditional that a sceptic is safe there.
Something like this may really have existed in Chinese and other pagan parallels. Something like it probably did exist among the last pagan priests of antiquity. A jolly old heathen Flamen or Pontifex Maximus did not want to be disturbed in explaining away the gods to his friends; and certainly did not want to make himself responsible for drawing the exact line between truth and fable in the metamorphoses of Ovid or the genealogies of Jupiter. And something of the same sort did exist in the Academic Anglicanism of the Erastian age in England, when scholarly Whigs and rather worldly bishops quoted indifferently Horace and Augustine and Gibbon over the nuts and wine. That is the Establishment which Dean Inge really likes to see established; that is the civilised institution which he does really and sincerely believe to be a good thing; a traditional home of learning and liberal education, though mainly for the few; a thing that to the outer world shall be as authoritative as the medieval abbots, but in its inner life be as casual as the Greek philosophers; a thing that need not exclude the heretical, but does exclude the ignorant; a thing that can admit all questions so long as it is never questioned itself.
Now a cultural tradition of that kind can have many marks of dignity and national value; and a man may without absurdity or falsity wish to preserve it as a national thing. But there are a number of conditions to be remembered, which Dean Inge now seems continually to forget. For one thing, the nation must continue in the same mood of respect towards the college of professors, or whatever it is to be called. The modern mood is changing very rapidly; and I think it would be an exaggeration to say that all England is now filled with an affection and veneration for Dons. Another difficulty is that whatever this sort of Chinese synod can do, it cannot exist side by side with a real and passionate religion. It was defeated by the Christians at the end of the Roman era. It was defeated even by the Methodists at the end of the eighteenth century. It is often quoted of poor Charles II that he said that Puritanism was no religion for a gentleman. It is not so often added that he also said that Anglicanism was no religion for a Christian.
This, I fancy, is what the Dean really means; and it explains why be is at once such a conservative and such an iconoclast; such a sceptic and such a Tory. It is not, of course, in so many words what he says. When driven to defend his bunch of bigwigs, with their libraries and endowments, he characteristically takes an old book out of those dusty shelves, and quotes from Burke the thesis that the Church was only the State seen in one light and the State was only the Church seen in another light. Burke always struck me as, of all men, the man with the most imaginative and the most utterly unreal mind. Even as he uttered such a phrase, he must have known that the Church was packed with people who did not believe in it, and that the leaders of the State had almost ceased to pretend to do so. All the time, it is worth remarking, Burke was gravely discussing the admission to the Church of Dissenters whose whole enthusiasm was admittedly concerned with making their Calvinist God if possible more of a devil than he was before. He knew the world around him was crowded with such fanatics and with such blasphemers; and yet he could bring himself to imagine that the actual secular condition of all England was the Church of Christ, if one only slightly shifted one’s point of view. But it was rather odd to maintain this even in Burke’s time; it is perfectly crazy to maintain it in our time. Dean Inge admits, that two great calamities might really ruin his plan, and make the position of the Church of England impossible. But he thinks that neither is likely enough to be worth considering. One is—what would happen if a large body of England really abandoned Christianity? The other is what would happen if England went over to Rome? The answer to both these impossibilities is very simple. It is that the second might happen any day, and the first has happened already.
L’ERASTIANO SULLA CHIESA DI STATO
Il decano Inge è così palesemente il più acuto, il più colto e il più originale della scuola scettica che rappresenta, che talvolta si ha inevitabilmente l’impressione di prendere di mira proprio lui, quando la singolarità è dovuta soltanto alla sua eccellenza. È dovuta, se dobbiamo dirlo più crudamente, al fatto che vi sono davvero pochissimi intellettuali di quella scuola che meritino una risposta. Io stesso, forse, l’ho spesso detto più crudamente di quanto intendessi; ma il duplice dovere che ne consegue presenta un problema di non facile soluzione. Il guaio è che egli si trova davvero in una posizione tanto falsa che la sua schietta descrizione suona già come un motteggio. Eppure può non essere intesa come un motteggio, ma soltanto come una verità. Certo la sua posizione non pare a lui altrettanto falsa quanto pare a noi; ma scusarla richiederebbe una lunga spiegazione, impossibile in un’espressione così breve. Per esempio, l’altro giorno egli scrisse una severa condanna di quei membri del clero anglicano che sono favorevoli alla separazione della Chiesa d’Inghilterra dallo Stato. Può sembrare brusco ribattere, come io sarei il primo tentato di fare, che il decano esiti naturalmente a recidere quell’unica sottilissima striscia di burocratico nastro rosso che ancora lo collega al Cristianesimo. Eppure è verissimo; e non è necessariamente soltanto ostile.
Per comprendere il curioso caso del decano Inge, in uno spirito di carità cristiana, dobbiamo lasciare per un momento ogni questione di credo e di definizione e richiamare alla mente un’altra immagine. È l’immagine che aveva in mente Matthew Arnold quando dichiarò apertamente che, pur essendo egli stesso quasi un agnostico, desiderava tuttavia conservare le istituzioni della religione, e specialmente la letteratura della religione; che le trovava conservate al meglio nella Chiesa d’Inghilterra e non consigliava a nessuno di lasciarla. Dobbiamo richiamare l’immagine di una storica gerarchia di sacerdoti che sono anche professori, e la cui occupazione principale è l’erudizione e lo studio delle lettere; non per nulla sia Arnold sia Inge ebbero legami con Oxford. La maggior parte di tali uomini sarebbe probabilmente cristiana per sentimento ereditario e per materia di studio; ma il loro Cristianesimo non sarebbe, per così dire, il punto centrale. Possiamo anche immaginare meglio l’istituzione se la pensiamo come una fondazione confuciana anziché cristiana. La sua idea è quella di una cultura classica che rimane indisturbata. Ma vi è questo ulteriore punto essenziale; che, se le sue tradizioni e i suoi riti devono restare indisturbati, così pure devono restare indisturbati i suoi dubbi e le sue negazioni. Dev’essere tanto tradizionale che uno scettico vi sia al sicuro.
Qualcosa di simile può essere davvero esistito in paralleli cinesi e in altri paralleli pagani. Qualcosa di simile probabilmente esistette davvero fra gli ultimi sacerdoti pagani dell’antichità. Un allegro vecchio Flamine o Pontefice Massimo ellenico non desiderava essere disturbato mentre spiegava via gli dèi ai suoi amici; e certamente non desiderava assumersi la responsabilità di tracciare la linea esatta fra verità e favola nelle metamorfosi di Ovidio o nelle genealogie di Giove. E qualcosa di analogo esistette davvero nell’anglicanesimo accademico dell’età erastiana in Inghilterra, quando dotti whig e vescovi piuttosto mondani citavano indifferentemente Orazio, Agostino e Gibbon davanti a noci e vino. È questa la Chiesa di Stato che il decano Inge ama davvero vedere stabilita; è questa l’istituzione civile che egli crede davvero e sinceramente essere una buona cosa; una tradizionale dimora di sapere e di liberale educazione, sia pure principalmente per pochi; una cosa che al mondo esterno appaia autorevole come gli abati medievali, ma che nella sua vita interiore sia disinvolta come i filosofi greci; una cosa che non abbia bisogno di escludere gli eretici, ma che escluda gli ignoranti; una cosa che possa ammettere ogni interrogativo purché non sia mai essa stessa messa in questione.
Ora, una tradizione culturale di quel genere può avere molti segni di dignità e di valore nazionale; e un uomo può, senza assurdità né falsità, desiderare di conservarla come cosa nazionale. Ma vi sono diverse condizioni da ricordare, che il decano Inge ora sembra continuamente dimenticare. Anzitutto, la nazione deve perseverare nel medesimo atteggiamento di rispetto verso il collegio dei professori, o comunque lo si voglia chiamare. L’atteggiamento moderno cambia molto rapidamente; e credo sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che tutta l’Inghilterra sia ora colma d’affetto e di venerazione per i Dons. Un’altra difficoltà è che, qualunque cosa possa fare questa sorta di sinodo cinese, esso non può coesistere con una religione reale e appassionata. Fu sconfitto dai cristiani alla fine dell’era romana. Fu sconfitto perfino dai metodisti alla fine del Settecento. Del povero Carlo II si cita spesso che egli disse che il Puritanesimo non era religione da gentiluomo. Non si aggiunge altrettanto spesso che egli disse anche che l’anglicanesimo non era religione da cristiano.
Questo, immagino, è ciò che il decano intende davvero; e spiega perché egli sia al tempo stesso così conservatore e così iconoclasta; così scettico e così tory. Non è, s’intende, ciò che dice con tante parole. Costretto a difendere il suo manipolo di pezzi grossi, con le loro biblioteche e le loro rendite, egli caratteristicamente estrae un vecchio libro da quei polverosi scaffali e cita da Burke la tesi secondo cui la Chiesa non era che lo Stato veduto sotto una certa luce e lo Stato non era che la Chiesa veduta sotto un’altra luce. Burke mi ha sempre colpito come, fra tutti gli uomini, quello dalla mente più immaginosa e più totalmente irreale. Perfino nel momento in cui pronunciava una frase simile, doveva sapere che la Chiesa era gremita di gente che non vi credeva, e che i capi dello Stato avevano quasi cessato di fingere di crederci. Per tutto il tempo, val la pena notarlo, Burke discuteva gravemente l’ammissione nella Chiesa di dissenzienti il cui intero entusiasmo era dichiaratamente rivolto a rendere il loro Dio calvinista, se possibile, ancor più diavolo di quanto già fosse. Egli sapeva che il mondo intorno a lui era affollato di simili fanatici e di simili bestemmiatori; eppure riusciva a indursi a immaginare che l’effettiva condizione secolare di tutta l’Inghilterra fosse la Chiesa di Cristo, purché si spostasse appena il proprio punto di vista. Ma era già piuttosto strano sostenere questo perfino ai tempi di Burke; è perfettamente folle sostenerlo ai tempi nostri. Il decano Inge ammette che due grandi calamità potrebbero davvero rovinare il suo piano, e rendere impossibile la posizione della Chiesa d’Inghilterra. Ma egli ritiene che nessuna delle due sia abbastanza probabile da meritare considerazione. La prima è: che cosa accadrebbe se una gran parte dell’Inghilterra abbandonasse davvero il Cristianesimo? La seconda è: che cosa accadrebbe se l’Inghilterra passasse a Roma? La risposta a entrambe queste impossibilità è semplicissima. È che la seconda potrebbe accadere da un giorno all’altro, e la prima è già accaduta.
Of course it is possible to play an endless game with the word “Christian” and perpetually extend its epoch by perpetually diminishing its meaning. By the time that everybody has agreed that being a Christian only means thinking that Christ was a good man, it will indeed be true that few persons outside lunatic asylums can be denied the name of Christian. But it is really a mere alteration in the meaning of a word that prevents us saying frankly that a great mass, probably a majority, of our modern people are Pagans. Many of them make a mock of standards of family piety or public dignity that were generally accepted by the Pagans. But most of them, if they have any religion at all, have a religion of pantheism or pure ethics which most of the great Christian characters of history, Catholic or Protestant would have instantly stamped as pagan. If you had asked Wesley, or Swedenborg, or Dr. Johnson, or Baxter, or Luther, they would have called the modern mood heathen more promptly, if possible, than would Bossuet or Bellarmine. If it is true that the Church is simply the religion of the State, we have got precious near to saying that it is simply the irreligion of the State.
There was a bitter and cynical man (also, I am sure, an Oxford man) who said, “The Church of England is our last bulwark against Christianity”. This is quite unjust as a description of the Church of England. But it is not altogether unjust as a description of Dean Inge. What is really at the back of his mind is this image of a great academic and cultural tradition, established as a national need but not specially as a spiritual need. It is to have religious texts—to criticise; religious ceremonial— to reform slightly and rather pompously from time to time; a sort of assumption on religion, in the sense that it could not tolerate the horrors of anything like the Russian denial of religion. But all through, it will be subject to one unmistakable test. It can coexist with Doubt; but it cannot coexist with Faith.
At the end of his article, Dean Inge tries to toss aside as impertinent the term Erastianism; the term is too obviously true not to irritate. But in any case he absurdly underrates its meaning at the moment. It is not a question of whether those who form a nation by being Englishmen could in the abstract form a religion by being Anglicans. It is a question of whether a Church which does at least exist, with some who belong to it and some who do not belong to it, should be ruled by those who do not belong to it. Erastianism exists today in the perfectly practical sense that any Jew, Holy Roller or Hyde Park atheist may dictate what that Christian Church shall do on any matter whatever, however intimate and sacred. Bradlaugh was a Member of Parliament; he might well have become a Cabinet Minister and appointed Bishops. Mr. Saklatvala was a Socialist leader and might quite well be a Labour Minister, with a majority in the House and might by Act of Parliament make the Prayer Book anything he chose. That is State Establishment, as now universally understood; that is what Dean Inge desires and presumably defends; or must set about the delicate task of defending.
THE END OF THE MODERNS
All schools of thought, moderate or revolutionary or reactionary, are agreed that the future is full of new possibilities or perils, that the various forms of revolt in art or thought are the beginning of big changes, and especially that certain geniuses, creative or destructive, have opened the gates of a new world. The Communist may think they are the gates of heaven, or the Conservative that they are the gates of hell. But both substantially agree that they mark not only the end of the world, but the beginning of another world. The modern writers who have been hailed alternatively as dynamic or demoniac are, for good or evil, but the forerunners of others yet more dynamic or more demoniac. Both sides are heartily agreed about this; and I have the misfortune to disagree with both of them.
I think the first fact about what may roughly be called Futurism is that it has no future. It has still a very lively and interesting present. Indeed, it has already a picturesque and romantic past. The life of D. H. Lawrence, for instance, has already become a mere legend, which might be of any antiquity; and the romantic and rather sentimental glamour that has already gathered about him is now quite as distant and diffused as that which gathered round Byron or Burns. As for the present, no period could be entirely dull when Mr. Aldous Huxley was writing in it; but it is significant to notice what he writes. In Brave New World he shows that however grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.
I take these two names as typical of what has been called in the last decade modernity or revolt; but the thesis I would seriously suggest covers something larger and perhaps simpler. The revolutionary elements in our epoch do not mark the beginning, but the end, of an epoch of revolution. I should hesitate to describe a number of distinguished and often honest literary gentlemen as Dregs; or I would have given that short and convenient title to this article. I prefer to put the same meaning, or even the same metaphor, into the words of a revolutionary poet (whose present unpopularity is enough to show how insecure is the future of revolutionary poetry) and while I drink to the memory of Lawrence or the health of Huxley, murmur the words:
All thine the last wine that I pour is The last in the chalice I drain.
That will suggest the same idea in less offensive language. In short, it is doubtless true, in the words of Mr. Jefferson Brick (that pioneer of revolt), that the Libation of Freedom must sometimes be quaffed in Blood; but whether it be in blood or wine, that cup is very nearly dry.
Naturalmente è possibile giocare all’infinito con la parola «cristiano» e prolungarne perpetuamente l’epoca diminuendone perpetuamente il significato. Quando col tempo tutti avranno convenuto che essere cristiano significa soltanto ritenere che Cristo fosse un uomo buono, sarà davvero vero che a poche persone fuori dei manicomi si potrà negare il nome di cristiano. Ma è in realtà una mera alterazione del significato di una parola ciò che ci impedisce di dire francamente che una gran massa, probabilmente una maggioranza, della nostra gente moderna è pagana. Molti di loro si fanno beffe di quei modelli di pietà familiare o di dignità pubblica che erano generalmente accettati dai pagani. Ma la maggior parte di loro, se pure ha una religione, ha una religione di panteismo o di pura etica che la maggior parte dei grandi caratteri cristiani della storia, cattolici o protestanti, avrebbe immediatamente bollato come pagana. Se aveste interrogato Wesley, o Swedenborg, o il Dr. Johnson, o Baxter, o Lutero, avrebbero definito pagano l’atteggiamento moderno ancor più prontamente, se possibile, di quanto lo avrebbero fatto Bossuet o Bellarmino. Se è vero che la Chiesa è semplicemente la religione dello Stato, siamo arrivati assai vicini a dire che è semplicemente l’irreligione dello Stato.
Ci fu un uomo amaro e cinico (anche lui, ne sono certo, un uomo di Oxford) che disse: «La Chiesa d’Inghilterra è il nostro ultimo baluardo contro il Cristianesimo». Questo è del tutto ingiusto come descrizione della Chiesa d’Inghilterra. Ma non è del tutto ingiusto come descrizione del decano Inge. Ciò che sta davvero in fondo alla sua mente è questa immagine di una grande tradizione accademica e culturale, istituita come bisogno nazionale ma non specificamente come bisogno spirituale. Deve avere testi religiosi — da criticare; cerimoniale religioso — da riformare leggermente e piuttosto pomposamente di tempo in tempo; una sorta di presunzione sulla religione, nel senso che non potrebbe tollerare gli orrori di qualcosa come la negazione russa della religione. Ma per tutto il tempo essa sarà soggetta a una prova inequivocabile. Può coesistere con il Dubbio; ma non può coesistere con la Fede.
Alla fine del suo articolo, il decano Inge cerca di respingere come impertinente il termine erastianesimo; il termine è troppo palesemente vero per non irritare. Ma in ogni caso egli ne sottovaluta assurdamente il significato attuale. Non si tratta di stabilire se coloro che formano una nazione essendo inglesi possano in astratto formare una religione essendo anglicani. Si tratta di stabilire se una Chiesa che quantomeno esiste, con alcuni che vi appartengono e altri che non vi appartengono, debba essere governata da coloro che non vi appartengono. L’erastianesimo esiste oggi nel senso perfettamente pratico che qualsiasi ebreo, Holy Roller o ateo di Hyde Park può dettare ciò che quella Chiesa cristiana dovrà fare in qualunque materia, per quanto intima e sacra. Bradlaugh fu Membro del Parlamento; ben avrebbe potuto diventare Ministro di Gabinetto e nominare Vescovi. Il signor Saklatvala fu un leader socialista e ben avrebbe potuto essere Ministro laburista, con una maggioranza alla Camera, e avrebbe potuto per Atto del Parlamento fare del libro di preghiere tutto ciò che gli piacesse. Questo è la Chiesa di Stato, come oggi universalmente intesa; questo è ciò che il decano Inge desidera e presumibilmente difende; o deve accingersi al delicato compito di difendere.
LA FINE DEI MODERNI
Tutte le scuole di pensiero, moderate o rivoluzionarie o reazionarie, concordano nel ritenere che il futuro sia pieno di nuove possibilità o pericoli, che le varie forme di rivolta nell’arte o nel pensiero siano l’ inizio di grandi mutamenti, e specialmente che certi geni, creativi o distruttivi, abbiano spalancato le porte di un mondo nuovo. Il comunista può ritenere che siano le porte del cielo, o il conservatore che siano le porte dell’inferno. Ma entrambi sostanzialmente convengono che esse segnino non soltanto la fine del mondo, ma l’inizio di un altro mondo. Gli scrittori moderni che sono stati salutati ora come dinamici ora come demoniaci sono, nel bene o nel male, soltanto i precursori di altri ancor più dinamici o più demoniaci. Entrambe le parti sono cordialmente d’accordo su questo; e io ho la sventura di dissentire da entrambe.
Penso che il primo fatto riguardo a ciò che si può grossolanamente chiamare Futurismo sia che esso non ha futuro. Ha ancora un presente vivacissimo e interessantissimo. Anzi, ha già un passato pittoresco e romantico. La vita di D. H. Lawrence, per esempio, è già divenuta una mera leggenda, che potrebbe essere di qualsiasi antichità; e il fascino romantico e piuttosto sentimentale che già si è raccolto attorno a lui è ormai altrettanto distante e diffuso di quello che si raccolse attorno a Byron o Burns. Quanto al presente, nessun periodo potrebbe essere del tutto grigio in cui il signor Aldous Huxley stesse scrivendo; ma è significativo notare ciò che egli scrive. In Brave New World egli mostra che, per quanto cupamente possa godere del presente, egli già decisamente odia il futuro. E io differisco da lui soltanto nel non credere che vi sia alcun tale futuro da odiare.
Prendo questi due nomi come tipici di ciò che nell’ultimo decennio è stato chiamato modernità o rivolta; ma la tesi che vorrei seriamente proporre abbraccia qualcosa di più ampio e forse di più semplice. Gli elementi rivoluzionari della nostra epoca segnano non l’inizio, ma la fine, di un’epoca di rivoluzione. Esiterei a descrivere un certo numero di distinti e spesso onesti gentiluomini di lettere come Feccia; o avrei dato quel titolo breve e comodo a questo articolo. Preferisco riporre lo stesso significato, o anche la stessa metafora, nelle parole di un poeta rivoluzionario (la cui attuale impopolarità basta a mostrare quanto sia insicuro il futuro della poesia rivoluzionaria) e, mentre bevo alla memoria di Lawrence o alla salute di Huxley, mormorare le parole:
Tuo è l’ultimo vino che verso L’ultimo che vuoto nel calice.
Ciò suggerirà la stessa idea in un linguaggio meno offensivo. In breve, è indubbiamente vero, con le parole del signor Jefferson Brick (quel pioniere della rivolta), che la Libagione della Libertà deve talvolta essere tracannata nel Sangue; ma sia essa nel sangue o nel vino, quella coppa è ormai quasi vuota.
My reason for thinking this has nothing to do with likes or dislikes or the wish being father to the thought; it is the sort of logic that is more like mathematics or chess. To almost all the modern moral and metaphysical systems, as stated by the moderns themselves, I should be content to add the comment, “Mate in three moves.” That is, these thinkers have landed themselves in positions which are already doomed by the laws of thought; or, to change the mathematical to the military figure, their positions are outflanked, their communications cut and their ammunition very obviously running short. In many cases, their form of revolt is one that can only be a sort of temporary formation.
Merely to explain what I mean, I will take an extremely crude and even clumsy example first. It does not touch the more distinguished types I have mentioned; but it does show in a very clear and plain shape the sense in which such things are intrinsically fugitive. I mean what may be called the literary use of blasphemy. Earlier, when the spirit of revolt was younger, it was used by some men of genius; by Swinburne, in whose work it seems now to have entirely lost its sting. Recently a modern writer, actually appointed to make a special study of Swinburne, asked wearily how anybody could get excited about the verses which said that the Galilean also would go down to the dead. It also disturbed the fine literature and very confused cosmic philosophy of Thomas Hardy, who tried to say (at the same time) that God did not exist, and that He ought to be ashamed of existing; or possibly that He ought to be ashamed of not existing.
This irritable profanity, which is already rather stale among cultivated people, is apparently still quite fresh to the Communists; but that is because Bolshevist Russia is the most backward State in Europe. It is even said that attempts were made to print atheistic assertions on match-boxes and sell them in England as propaganda. If it is true, they must have a very queer idea of England, to suppose that its somewhat too inert populace could be roused to universal civil war by bad language printed on a match-box. But the only point here is that this sort of bad language, like all bad language, necessarily weakens itself by use. The literature of atheism is bound to fail, exactly in proportion as it succeeds. The Bolshevists have not merely tried to abolish God, which some think a trick needing some ingenuity. They have tried to make an institution of the abolition of God; and when the God is abolished, the abolition is abolished. There can never be any future for the literature of blasphemy; for if it fails, it fails; and if it succeeds, it becomes a literature of respectability. In short, all that sort of effect can only be an instantaneous effect; like smashing a valuable vase that cannot be smashed again. The heaven-defying gesture can only be impressive as a last gesture. Blasphemy is by definition the end of everything, including the blasphemer. The wife of Job saw the common sense of this, when she instinctively said, “Curse God and die.” The modern poet, by some thoughtless oversight, so often neglects to die.
This is a very crude and popular instance; but it exactly defines what I mean when I say that all these death-dealing dynamic motions carry the seeds of their own death. And when we turn to the more subtle and suggestive writers, such as those I have named, we shall find that this is exactly their own condition. They are not opening the gates either of heaven or hell; they are in a blind-alley, at the end of which there is no door. They are always philosophising and they have no philosophy. They have not reached that reality, that reason of things, or even that fully realised unreason of things, for which they are obviously and indeed avowedly seeking. But, what is here more to the point, they do not (like the old revolutionists) even know the direction in which they are to seek it. They have failed to discover, not only any purpose in the world, but even any purpose in the will. They are witty, brilliant and fashionable bankrupts. They have come to an end; and they have not come to an End. The earlier rebels were happy in being pioneers of the actual forward movements of their time; as Walt Whitman, axe in hand, walked before the actual march of industrial democracy. But Mr. Aldous Huxley can hardly be roused by the word Democracy. D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, could be roused by the word Industrialism.
So far as that is concerned, the case is simple enough. Lawrence, whom so many moderns have made a sort of test of modernity, was in fact in violent revolt against anything and everything that can be called modern. He did not merely hate industrial machinery and the servile society it has produced. He hated practically all the effects of science and public education and even political progress. All that is very right and proper; but he also hated intellectualism along with industrialism; though why anybody should think industrialism particularly intellectual, I cannot imagine. But he was perfectly right in his revolt against these things; only they are all in their very nature modern or very recent things. He himself was in favour of very ancient things, and notably of one of the most ancient things on the earth, the worship of the earth itself; the Great Mother: Demeter. But he could not, by his own admission, even do this, without almost literally cutting off his own head. It may be regarded, in a thinker, as at least equivalent to cutting his own throat. He confessed himself, in effect, that he could only worship Demeter from the neck downwards. He could only do it by setting the subconsciousness against the consciousness, or in other words, the dreams against the daylight. It is surely a remarkable gospel for an age of realism. In a famous passage he wrote, “In my dark heart gods are,” but added that in his “white mind” they were not, having been washed or whitewashed out by elementary education. But the modern educated mind is not white; it is only pale.
La mia ragione per pensare questo non ha nulla a che fare con simpatie o antipatie o col desiderio che si fa padre del pensiero; è il tipo di logica che assomiglia più alla matematica o agli scacchi. A quasi tutti i moderni sistemi morali e metafisici, così come enunciati dai moderni stessi, mi accontenterei di aggiungere il commento: «Matto in tre mosse». Vale a dire, questi pensatori si sono cacciati in posizioni che sono già condannate dalle leggi del pensiero; o, per mutare la figura matematica in figura militare, le loro posizioni sono aggirate, le loro comunicazioni tagliate e le loro munizioni molto evidentemente agli sgoccioli. In molti casi, la loro forma di rivolta è tale da poter essere soltanto una sorta di formazione temporanea.
Semplicemente per chiarire ciò che intendo, prenderò prima un esempio estremamente rozzo e perfino goffo. Esso non tocca i tipi più insigni che ho menzionato; ma mostra in forma assai chiara e piana il senso in cui simili cose sono intrinsecamente fugaci. Intendo ciò che si può chiamare l’uso letterario della bestemmia. Prima, quando lo spirito di rivolta era più giovane, essa fu usata da alcuni uomini di genio; da Swinburne, nella cui opera pare ora avere interamente perduto il suo pungiglione. Di recente uno scrittore moderno, incaricato proprio di compiere uno studio speciale su Swinburne, chiese stancamente come mai qualcuno potesse eccitarsi per i versi che dicevano che anche il Galileo sarebbe sceso fra i morti. Essa turbò anche la fine letteratura e la assai confusa cosmica filosofia di Thomas Hardy, il quale cercò di dire (nello stesso tempo) che Dio non esisteva, e che avrebbe dovuto vergognarsi di esistere; o forse che avrebbe dovuto vergognarsi di non esistere.
Questa irritabile profanità, che è già piuttosto stantia fra le persone colte, è a quanto pare ancora del tutto fresca per i comunisti; ma ciò avviene perché la Russia bolscevica è lo Stato più arretrato d’Europa. Si dice perfino che siano stati fatti tentativi di stampare asserzioni ateistiche sulle scatole di fiammiferi e di venderle in Inghilterra come propaganda. Se è vero, essi devono avere un’idea assai bizzarra dell’Inghilterra, per supporre che la sua popolazione un po’ troppo inerte potesse essere aizzata a una guerra civile universale da parolacce stampate su una scatola di fiammiferi. Ma l’unico punto qui è che questo tipo di turpiloquio, come ogni turpiloquio, necessariamente si indebolisce con l’uso. La letteratura dell’ateismo è destinata a fallire, esattamente in proporzione al suo successo. I bolscevichi non hanno soltanto tentato di abolire Dio, il che alcuni ritengono un trucco che richiede un certo ingegno. Hanno tentato di fare un’istituzione dell’abolizione di Dio; e quando Dio è abolito, l’abolizione è abolita. Non potrà mai esserci alcun futuro per la letteratura della bestemmia; poiché, se fallisce, fallisce; e se riesce, diventa una letteratura di rispettabilità. In breve, tutto quel genere di effetto può essere soltanto un effetto istantaneo; come fracassare un vaso prezioso che non può essere fracassato una seconda volta. Il gesto di sfida al cielo può essere impressionante soltanto come ultimo gesto. La bestemmia è per definizione la fine di tutto, incluso il bestemmiatore. La moglie di Giobbe ne vide il buon senso, quando istintivamente disse: «Maledici Dio e muori». Il poeta moderno, per qualche sbadata dimenticanza, così spesso trascura di morire.
Questo è un esempio assai rozzo e popolare; ma esso definisce esattamente ciò che intendo quando dico che tutti questi dinamici movimenti apportatori di morte recano in sé i semi della propria morte. E quando ci volgiamo verso gli scrittori più sottili e suggestivi, come quelli che ho nominato, troveremo che questa è esattamente la loro stessa condizione. Essi non stanno aprendo le porte né del cielo né dell’inferno; sono in un vicolo cieco, in fondo al quale non c’è alcuna porta. Filosofeggiano sempre e non hanno alcuna filosofia. Non hanno raggiunto quella realtà, quella ragione delle cose, e neppure quella pienamente realizzata irragionevolezza delle cose, che ovviamente e anzi dichiaratamente vanno cercando. Ma, ciò che qui più importa, essi non conoscono neppure (come i vecchi rivoluzionari) la direzione in cui devono cercarla. Hanno mancato di scoprire, non soltanto qualsiasi scopo nel mondo, ma perfino qualsiasi scopo nella volontà. Sono spiritosi, brillanti e alla moda: dei falliti. Sono giunti a una fine; e non sono giunti a un Fine. I ribelli precedenti erano felici di essere pionieri degli effettivi movimenti in avanti del loro tempo; come Walt Whitman, scure alla mano, camminava innanzi all’effettiva marcia della democrazia industriale. Ma il signor Aldous Huxley difficilmente si lascia scuotere dalla parola Democrazia. D. H. Lawrence, d’altra parte, poteva lasciarsi scuotere dalla parola Industrialismo.
Per quanto concerne questo, il caso è abbastanza semplice. Lawrence, che tanti moderni hanno fatto una sorta di banco di prova della modernità, era in realtà in violenta rivolta contro qualsiasi cosa possa dirsi moderna. Egli non odiava soltanto il macchinario industriale e la servile società che esso ha prodotto. Odiava praticamente tutti gli effetti della scienza e dell’istruzione pubblica e perfino del progresso politico. Tutto ciò è giustissimo e sacrosanto; ma egli odiava anche l’intellettualismo insieme all’industrialismo; benché perché mai qualcuno debba ritenere l’industrialismo particolarmente intellettuale, io non riesca a immaginarlo. Ma egli aveva perfettamente ragione nella sua rivolta contro queste cose; solo che esse sono tutte, per loro stessa natura, cose moderne o assai recenti. Egli stesso era favorevole a cose assai antiche, e in particolare a una delle cose più antiche della terra, il culto della terra stessa; la Grande Madre: Demetra. Ma egli non poteva, per sua stessa ammissione, fare neppure questo, senza quasi letteralmente tagliarsi la testa. Ciò può considerarsi, in un pensatore, quantomeno equivalente a tagliarsi la gola. Egli confessò, in effetti, di poter adorare Demetra soltanto dal collo in giù. Poteva farlo soltanto opponendo il subconscio alla coscienza, o in altre parole, i sogni alla luce del giorno. È di certo un notevole vangelo per un’età di realismo. In un celebre passo egli scrisse: «Nel mio cuore oscuro vi sono dèi», ma aggiunse che nella sua «mente bianca» non vi erano, essendo stati lavati o imbiancati via da un’elementare istruzione. Ma la moderna mente istruita non è bianca; è soltanto pallida.
The point is that from every point of view, ancient or modern, his solution is not a solution. A man cannot leave his head at home and send his body dancing through the world and doing as it likes; and there is no earthly reason for supposing that it will do what it ought, from a modern or any other point of view. For instance, if it fancies food, it will steal, and it will steal quite as readily from Communist Stores as from private houses. This is not the beginning of a new life; a gorgeous jungle opening before man as a sort of Mowgli. It is the end of an utterly impossible argument, which cannot be carried any further. A man wallowing in the earth with the animals would not be an animal. He would only be a lunatic; which is the exact opposite of an animal. There was no way out of the intellectual or anti-intellectual impasse into which Lawrence had got himself; except the third road which he never thought of … possibly because it leads to Rome. If mere rationalism is insufficient, we must get above the reason and not below it. The direct appeal to Nature is utterly unnatural. I admit it was weakly conceded by the Pantheists of the first revolutionary phase; now very remote; and many who would pass for pious accepted it. Professor Babbitt has pointed out some of the dangerous concessions in Wordsworth. Another even more orthodox writer expressed the error of that period. He said that we must rise through Nature up to Nature’s God. He was wrong. We must descend from God down to God’s Nature. Nature is only right when seen in the light of the highest right; whether it be, as some Humanists would say, in the mind of Man, or as Christians would say, in the mind of God. But they really believe in their God; and Lawrence did not really believe in his Goddess. He passionately disbelieved in everything, except something in which he could not really believe.
Mr. Aldous Huxley, whom I have taken as the other outstanding talent of that time, sees this impossibility and avoids it. But he can only avoid it by cutting down his own standard to something so thin that it can hardly stand. In one of his novels a character sums up much of the general teaching of the author, by saying that Man must not hope to be either an animal or an angel. He adds, significantly, that it is a tight-rope sort of business. Now walking on a tight-rope is both difficult and dangerous; and the author makes the good life really more difficult than it is for an ascetic. He has not only to avoid being an animal, but he must guard against any unlucky accident that might turn him into an angel. That is, he is forbidden to have the enthusiasms and spiritual ambitions that have sustained the saints, and yet he has got to become in cold blood something much more exceptional than a saint. Nobody asks such a realist as Mr. Huxley to idealise the real. But such a realist must surely know that human nature cannot show, at every instant, the valour and vigilance of a spiritual tight-rope walker, cannot suffer more for this ideal than all the heroes, and yet be forbidden even to idealise its own ideal. The plan of life is simply obviously unworkable; where the plans of the wildest mystics and martyrs have proved workable.
I say that I do not abhor these men as the first figures of an advancing anarchist army. On the contrary, I admire these men as the last figures of a defeated anarchist army. I take these two original and forcible writers as types of many others; but the point is that they are not, like the anarchists of history, at the head of an army marching in a determined direction. That is exactly what they are not. Lawrence rushed out against almost everything; Huxley, being more sensitive, recoils from almost everything. But, however valuable be the vivid description of the one or the sharp criticism of the other, they are not valuable as guides; and certainly not as guides to a revolution. They had not the simplification given either by religion or irreligion. There was something grand about D. H. Lawrence groping blindly in the dark; but he really was in the dark, not only about the Will of God, but about the will of D. H. Lawrence. He was ready to go anywhere; but he did not really know where to go next. Aldous Huxley is ideally witty; but he is at his wit’s end.
Now of course there are numberless copyists and followers calling themselves revolutionary, who would say that they knew where to go; simply because they are content with some conventional word like Communism. For Communism is almost the same word as convention; it means people getting “together”, and nothing else. But that very fact illustrates what I say, when I say that the army is short of ammunition and the end is near. When the great democratic movement began, it was supported by real democratic emotions. Only Comradeship can be the soul of Communism; for otherwise it has no soul. But the more we note the actual temper of the new rebels, the more we shall note that all that is gone. The men who call themselves Communists are not Comrades. Their tone is bitterly individualistic, and bitterly critical. When Walt Whitman looked at a crowd, it is really true to say that he loved the crowd. When a modern poet, imitating the free verse of Whitman (which was the least free thing about him), describes a crowd, it is always to describe his disgust with the crowd. They have none of the natural sentiments that would correspond with their unnatural dogmas. In other words, the army is short of powder, short of passion, short of the primary impulses that make such an army act. For they are not a vanguard advancing, they are the end of a revolutionary adventure, both for good and evil, which began more than a hundred years ago; and they are fighting the rearguard action of a retreat. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity really meant something to the emotions of those who first used the phrase. But Fraternity is the last emotion anyone is likely to find in an acrid article or poem by a modern rebel; Liberty is lost in both systems, old and new; and Equality only remains in the form of a dull attempt at uniformity, copied from that very mechanical capitalism which the rebels would reject.
Il punto è che, da ogni punto di vista, antico o moderno, la sua soluzione non è una soluzione. Un uomo non può lasciare la testa a casa e mandare il proprio corpo a danzare per il mondo facendo ciò che gli pare; e non c’è ragione terrena per supporre che esso farà ciò che dovrebbe, da un punto di vista moderno o da qualsiasi altro. Per esempio, se gli venisse voglia di cibo, ruberà, e ruberà altrettanto prontamente dai Magazzini Comunisti quanto dalle case private. Questo non è l’inizio di una nuova vita; una splendida giungla che si apre davanti all’uomo come una sorta di Mowgli. È la fine di un argomento del tutto impossibile, che non può essere spinto oltre. Un uomo che sguazzasse nella terra con gli animali non sarebbe un animale. Sarebbe soltanto un pazzo; il che è l’esatto opposto di un animale. Non c’era via d’uscita dall’impasse intellettuale o anti-intellettuale in cui Lawrence si era cacciato; tranne la terza via a cui egli non pensò mai… forse perché conduce a Roma. Se il mero razionalismo è insufficiente, dobbiamo elevarci al di sopra della ragione e non al di sotto di essa. L’appello diretto alla Natura è del tutto innaturale. Ammetto che fu debolmente concesso dai panteisti della prima fase rivoluzionaria; ora assai remota; e molti che passerebbero per pii lo accettarono. Il professor Babbitt ha messo in luce alcune delle pericolose concessioni in Wordsworth. Un altro scrittore, ancor più ortodosso, espresse l’errore di quel periodo. Egli disse che dobbiamo salire attraverso la Natura fino al Dio della Natura. Sbagliava. Dobbiamo scendere da Dio giù fino alla Natura di Dio. La Natura è giusta soltanto quando la si vede alla luce del più alto diritto; sia esso, come direbbero alcuni umanisti, nella mente dell’Uomo, o, come direbbero i cristiani, nella mente di Dio. Ma essi credono davvero nel loro Dio; e Lawrence non credeva davvero nella sua Dea. Egli appassionatamente non credeva in nulla, tranne qualcosa in cui non poteva davvero credere.
Il signor Aldous Huxley, che ho preso come l’altro talento eminente di quel tempo, vede questa impossibilità e la evita. Ma può evitarla soltanto riducendo il proprio criterio a qualcosa di così esile da poter appena reggersi. In uno dei suoi romanzi un personaggio riassume gran parte dell’insegnamento generale dell’autore, dicendo che l’Uomo non deve sperare di essere né un animale né un angelo. Aggiunge, significativamente, che è una faccenda da funambolo. Ora, camminare su una fune è insieme difficile e pericoloso; e l’autore rende la vita buona in realtà più difficile di quanto essa sia per un asceta. Egli deve non soltanto evitare di essere un animale, ma deve guardarsi da qualsiasi malaugurato incidente che potesse trasformarlo in un angelo. Vale a dire, gli è vietato avere gli entusiasmi e le ambizioni spirituali che hanno sostenuto i santi, e tuttavia deve diventare a mente fredda qualcosa di ben più eccezionale di un santo. Nessuno chiede a un realista come il signor Huxley di idealizzare il reale. Ma un tale realista dovrà pur sapere che la natura umana non può mostrare, a ogni istante, il valore e la vigilanza di un funambolo spirituale, non può soffrire per questo ideale più di tutti gli eroi, e tuttavia vedersi vietato perfino di idealizzare il proprio ideale. Il progetto di vita è semplicemente e ovviamente inattuabile; là dove i progetti dei più selvaggi mistici e martiri si sono dimostrati attuabili.
Dico che non aborro questi uomini come le prime figure di un avanzante esercito anarchico. Al contrario, ammiro questi uomini come le ultime figure di un esercito anarchico sconfitto. Prendo questi due scrittori originali e vigorosi come tipi di molti altri; ma il punto è che essi non sono, come gli anarchici della storia, alla testa di un esercito che marcia in una direzione decisa. È esattamente ciò che non sono. Lawrence si scagliava contro quasi tutto; Huxley, essendo più sensibile, rifugge da quasi tutto. Ma, per quanto preziosa sia la vivida descrizione dell’uno o l’acuta critica dell’altro, essi non sono preziosi come guide; e certamente non come guide a una rivoluzione. Non avevano la semplificazione data o dalla religione o dall’irreligione. C’era qualcosa di grandioso in D. H. Lawrence che brancolava ciecamente nel buio; ma egli era davvero al buio, non soltanto sulla Volontà di Dio, ma sulla volontà di D. H. Lawrence. Era pronto ad andare ovunque; ma non sapeva davvero dove andare poi. Aldous Huxley è idealmente spiritoso; ma è al colmo dell’arguzia e insieme alla fine di essa.
Ora, naturalmente vi sono innumerevoli copisti e seguaci che si dicono rivoluzionari, i quali direbbero di sapere dove andare; semplicemente perché si accontentano di qualche parola convenzionale come Comunismo. Poiché Comunismo è quasi la stessa parola di convenzione; significa gente che si mette «insieme», e nient’altro. Ma proprio questo fatto illustra ciò che dico, quando dico che all’esercito mancano le munizioni e che la fine è vicina. Quando cominciò il grande movimento democratico, esso fu sostenuto da reali emozioni democratiche. Soltanto la Fratellanza può essere l’anima del Comunismo; poiché altrimenti esso non ha anima. Ma quanto più notiamo l’effettivo temperamento dei nuovi ribelli, tanto più noteremo che tutto ciò se n’è andato. Gli uomini che si dicono comunisti non sono Compagni. Il loro tono è amaramente individualistico, e amaramente critico. Quando Walt Whitman guardava una folla, è davvero esatto dire che egli amava la folla. Quando un poeta moderno, imitando il verso libero di Whitman (che era la cosa meno libera in lui), descrive una folla, è sempre per descrivere il proprio disgusto per la folla. Essi non hanno alcuno dei sentimenti naturali che corrisponderebbero ai loro dogmi innaturali. In altre parole, all’esercito manca la polvere, manca la passione, mancano gli impulsi primari che fanno agire un simile esercito. Poiché essi non sono un’avanguardia che avanza, sono la fine di un’avventura rivoluzionaria, nel bene e nel male, che cominciò più di cento anni fa; e stanno combattendo l’azione di retroguardia di una ritirata. Libertà, Uguaglianza e Fraternità significavano davvero qualcosa per le emozioni di coloro che per primi usarono la frase. Ma la Fraternità è l’ultima emozione che si sia disposti a trovare in un acre articolo o poema di un ribelle moderno; la Libertà è perduta in entrambi i sistemi, il vecchio e il nuovo; e l’Uguaglianza rimane soltanto nella forma di un piatto tentativo di uniformità, copiato proprio da quel meccanico capitalismo che i ribelli respingerebbero.
Along with those who accept the thing as a label, or hope fallaciously that they may accept it as a fashion, there are some who accept it in a more noble but very negative way; for the very reasons I have urged in this article. I mean that they accept it desperately, as the only way out of an intellectual impasse. It is not too much to say that Mr. Middleton Murry accepts Soviets with the gestures of a great heathen accepting suicide. He seems to exult in the thought of it being the end of everything, or at least the end of nearly everything he likes. That is yet another example of the psychology I have attempted to describe; the psychology of men who have come to the end. I do not want to confuse this distinct impression with jaded journalistic talk about pessimism. People will call Mr. Aldous Huxley a pessimist; in the sense of one who makes the worst of it. To me he is that far more gloomy character; the man who makes the best of it. He gives the best advice he can; in conditions of converging impossibility. I do not write here in a hostile spirit about any of these recent realistic or revolutionary writers; on the contrary, I sincerely sympathise with them, because, unlike the earlier revolutionists, they know they are in an intellectual hole. Doubtless, there are thousands of gay and buoyant innovators, who are not intelligent enough to know it. But the same plan of defeat is spread over the whole situation. It can be seen, for instance, in the thousands of thoughtless “sexual” novels, the writers of which are evidently unconscious that they have got into a logical contradiction about the whole position of sex. They inherit the notion that sex is a serious crux and crisis; for indeed this is necessary to the very nature of a novel. In this they are living on the last legacy of Romanticism; which, in its turn, was living on the last legacy of religion. But their new and simple philosophy teaches them that sex is only the sort of necessity that is also a triviality; that sex is no more crucial than smoking. So that the modern novelist, torn between two ideas, has to attempt to write a story about a man who smokes twenty cigarettes and tries to think that each of them is a crisis. In all these things there is an intellectual tangle; the sort of thing that eventually tightens and throttles. Of this sort of philosopher it is exactly and literally true to say that, if you give him rope enough, he will hang himself. It is consoling to reflect that suicide holds a sublime place in his philosophy.
WALTER DE LA MARE It has not always been sufficiently understood that a critic of poetry should be a poetical critic. Literary history is littered with the disasters of good critics who become bad critics, merely by colliding with good poets. But one of the first facts which a good poetical critic will realise, is one which the poet of necessity realises: the limitation of language, and especially the poverty and clumsiness of the language of praise. There is hardly any praise of poets that does not sound as if they were all the same sort of poets, and this is true even when the praise is intended to say precisely the opposite. Thus the habit of calling somebody “unique” has become universal, and we may insist that a man is original, and still leave the impression that originality is about as rare as original sin.
But this difficulty applies in a special way to Mr. Walter de la Mare and his poetry, because the common poetical terms of praise for that poetry are also applied to a totally different sort of poetry. He stands very close, in time and place and appearance, to a group of writers, most of them good writers and some of them great writers, from whom he is really quite free and distinct. Only the epithets applied to him are also applied to them. When we say that he is a dreamy and fantastic poet, an interpreter of elfland, a singer of strange rhymes that have a witchery and wild charm for children, and the rest, we are driven to use a number of terms that have now become a little trite, perhaps, as applied to other talented persons who are utterly different. The fountains, the foundations, the primary principles of imagination and the view of life, are really quite different in a man like Mr. de la Mare from all that they are, let us say, in a man like Sir James Barrie or a man like Mr. A. A. Milne. This, I need hardly say, has nothing to do with depreciating these authors, but only with appreciating each author for his own sake. Yet there is a sort of tangle of tradition, and a recognised traffic in certain subjects, which may well confuse a modern reader about all this sort of literature of fancy. For instance; we might start by saying that the tradition of Treasure Island and its pirates was continued in Peter Pan and its pirates. We might say that the elvish children of Peter Pan were continued in the elvish children of When We Were Very Young. And then we might imagine vaguely that all this sort of thing, the bottle of rum and the crocodile’s dinner and the king’s breakfast, were all somehow stuffed or stirred up together in a hotch-potch called Peacock Pie. But this is to miss the whole point about the poet, and especially where he is rather more than a poet. It would be easy to link him up with the tradition of Treasure Island; for he has himself written a very fascinating fantasia about Desert Islands. But the association would be an error, for he has not really laid up for himself treasure in the same sort of treasure islands. There is really a sort of dynasty, a Scottish dynasty, of Stevenson and Barrie. But it descended on the infantile side to Scots like Kenneth Graham and on the manly, or at least boyish side to Scots like John Buchan. It has nothing to do with Walter de la Mare; because his philosophy is different. One way of putting it would be to say that, poetic as are the fairy-tales of the Scots, they are the fairy-tales of the Sceptics. The fairy-tales of de la Mare are not those of the Sceptic but of the Mystic. Take the primary idea with which all the best work for imaginative infancy, as supplied by Stevenson and Barrie, really began. It began with an idea which is called “make-believe”. That is, strictly speaking, it is written by men who do not believe; and even written for children who do not believe; children who quite logically and legitimately make believe. But de la Mare’s world is not merely a world of illusion; it is in quite another sense a world of imagination. It is a real world of which the reality can only be represented to us by images. De la Mare does not, in the material sense, believe that there is an ogre who crawls round houses and is turned back by the influence of the Holy Child; any more than Barrie believes that there is an immortal little boy who plays physically in Kensington Gardens. But de la Mare does believe that there is a devouring evil that is always warring with innocence and happiness; and Barrie does not believe that innocence and happiness go on having an uninterrupted legal occupation of Kensington Gardens. Stories of the school of Peter Pan are radiant and refreshing dreams; but they are dreams. They are the dreams of somebody taking refuge from real life in an inner life of the imagination; but not necessarily of somebody believing that there is also a larger universal life corresponding to that imagination. The first is a fabulist but the second is a symbolist; as if we were to compare the talking animals of La Fontaine with the typical animals of Blake. Blake (though certainly mad in a quiet way) probably did not believe that golden lions and tigers walked about on the hills of Albion; and La Fontaine did not believe that garrulous lions engaged in chatty conversation with foxes. But Blake did believe that certain tremendous truths, only to be shown under the types of golden lions, were really true; and, what is most important of all, were not only within him, but beyond him. So the conversation of Mr. Milne’s funny little pigs and bears is as delightful as La Fontaine, and only deceptive in the same sense as La Fontaine. That is to say, it is not false, because it is fictitious; or what was called fabulous. But the rhymes of the Mad Prince, though they would be called fantastic, are not merely fabulous. The Mad Prince, like the Mad Poet, in the person of poor Blake, is, after all, something essentially different from The Mad Hatter. There are hollow undertones in his queer questions, about green grass for graves, which do really re-echo from things deep and secret as the grave.
Insieme a coloro che accettano la cosa come un’etichetta, o sperano fallacemente di poterla accettare come una moda, ve ne sono alcuni che la accettano in un modo più nobile ma assai negativo; proprio per le ragioni che ho addotto in questo articolo. Voglio dire che essi la accettano disperatamente, come l’unica via d’uscita da un’impasse intellettuale. Non è troppo dire che il signor Middleton Murry accetta i Soviet con i gesti di un grande pagano che accetta il suicidio. Egli pare esultare al pensiero che sia la fine di tutto, o almeno la fine di quasi tutto ciò che gli piace. Questo è ancora un altro esempio della psicologia che ho tentato di descrivere; la psicologia di uomini giunti alla fine. Non voglio confondere questa netta impressione con lo stanco chiacchiericcio giornalistico sul pessimismo. La gente chiamerà il signor Aldous Huxley un pessimista; nel senso di uno che vede tutto nel peggiore dei modi. Per me egli è quel carattere assai più cupo; l’uomo che fa buon viso a cattivo gioco. Egli dà il miglior consiglio che può; in condizioni di convergente impossibilità. Non scrivo qui in spirito ostile su alcuno di questi recenti scrittori realistici o rivoluzionari; al contrario, sinceramente simpatizzo con loro, perché, diversamente dai rivoluzionari precedenti, sanno di essere in un vicolo cieco intellettuale. Senza dubbio vi sono migliaia di gai e baldanzosi innovatori, che non sono abbastanza intelligenti da saperlo. Ma il medesimo schema di sconfitta è disteso sull’intera situazione. Lo si può vedere, per esempio, nelle migliaia di sconsiderati romanzi «sessuali», i cui autori sono evidentemente inconsapevoli di essere caduti in una contraddizione logica riguardo all’intera posizione del sesso. Essi ereditano la nozione che il sesso sia un serio crocevia e una crisi; poiché in verità questo è necessario alla stessa natura di un romanzo. In ciò essi vivono sull’ultimo lascito del Romanticismo; il quale, a sua volta, viveva sull’ultimo lascito della religione. Ma la loro nuova e semplice filosofia insegna loro che il sesso è soltanto quel genere di necessità che è anche una banalità; che il sesso non è più cruciale del fumare. Cosicché il romanziere moderno, lacerato fra due idee, deve tentare di scrivere una storia su un uomo che fuma venti sigarette e cerca di credere che ciascuna di esse sia una crisi. In tutte queste cose vi è un groviglio intellettuale; quel genere di groviglio che alla fine si stringe e strozza. Di questo tipo di filosofo è esattamente e letteralmente vero dire che, se gli dai corda a sufficienza, si impiccherà. È consolante riflettere che il suicidio occupa un sublime posto nella sua filosofia.
WALTER DE LA MARE — Non sempre si è compreso a sufficienza che un critico di poesia dovrebbe essere un critico poetico. La storia letteraria è disseminata dei disastri di buoni critici diventati cattivi critici, semplicemente per essersi scontrati con buoni poeti. Ma uno dei primi fatti che un buon critico poetico realizzerà è quello che il poeta di necessità realizza: la limitatezza del linguaggio, e specialmente la povertà e la goffaggine del linguaggio della lode. Non c’è quasi lode di poeti che non suoni come se fossero tutti la stessa specie di poeti, e questo è vero perfino quando la lode intende dire precisamente l’opposto. Così l’abitudine di chiamare qualcuno «unico» è diventata universale, e possiamo insistere che un uomo è originale, e tuttavia lasciare l’impressione che l’originalità sia rara quanto il peccato originale.
Ma questa difficoltà si applica in modo speciale al signor Walter de la Mare e alla sua poesia, perché i termini poetici comuni di lode per quella poesia sono applicati anche a un genere di poesia del tutto diverso. Egli sta assai vicino, per tempo, luogo e apparenza, a un gruppo di scrittori, la maggior parte dei quali buoni scrittori e alcuni grandi scrittori, dai quali egli è in realtà del tutto libero e distinto. Solo che gli epiteti applicati a lui sono applicati anche a loro. Quando diciamo che è un poeta sognante e fantastico, un interprete del regno degli elfi, un cantore di strane rime che hanno un incantesimo e un fascino selvaggio per i fanciulli, e via dicendo, siamo costretti a usare un certo numero di termini che sono ormai divenuti un po’ triti, forse, applicati ad altre persone di talento del tutto diverse. Le fonti, le fondamenta, i principi primi dell’ immaginazione e la visione della vita sono in realtà del tutto diversi in un uomo come il signor de la Mare da ciò che sono, diciamo, in un uomo come Sir James Barrie o un uomo come il signor A. A. Milne. Questo, non ho quasi bisogno di dirlo, non ha nulla a che vedere con lo svalutare questi autori, ma soltanto con l’apprezzare ciascun autore per ciò che è. Eppure vi è una sorta di groviglio di tradizione, e un riconosciuto traffico su certi soggetti, che potrebbe bene confondere un lettore moderno riguardo a tutto questo genere di letteratura di fantasia. Per esempio; potremmo cominciare col dire che la tradizione di Treasure Island e dei suoi pirati fu continuata in Peter Pan e nei suoi pirati. Potremmo dire che i fanciulli elfici di Peter Pan furono continuati nei fanciulli elfici di When We Were Very Young. E poi potremmo immaginare vagamente che tutto questo genere di cose, la bottiglia di rum e la cena del coccodrillo e la colazione del re, fossero tutte in qualche modo pigiate o rimescolate insieme in un guazzabuglio chiamato Peacock Pie. Ma questo significa mancare del tutto il punto riguardo al poeta, e specialmente là dove egli è qualcosa di più di un poeta. Sarebbe facile collegarlo alla tradizione di Treasure Island; poiché egli ha scritto egli stesso una fantasia assai affascinante sulle Isole Deserte. Ma l’associazione sarebbe un errore, poiché egli non si è realmente accumulato un tesoro nello stesso genere di isole del tesoro. Vi è davvero una sorta di dinastia, una dinastia scozzese, di Stevenson e Barrie. Ma essa discese, sul versante infantile, a scozzesi come Kenneth Graham e, sul versante virile, o almeno fanciullesco, a scozzesi come John Buchan. Non ha nulla a che vedere con Walter de la Mare; perché la sua filosofia è diversa. Un modo di dirlo sarebbe dire che, per quanto poetiche siano le fiabe degli scozzesi, esse sono le fiabe degli Scettici. Le fiabe di de la Mare non sono quelle dello Scettico ma del Mistico. Prendete l’idea primaria con cui davvero cominciò tutta la migliore opera per l’infanzia immaginativa, quale fornita da Stevenson e Barrie. Essa cominciò con un’idea che si chiama «far finta». Vale a dire, in senso stretto, è scritta da uomini che non credono; e perfino scritta per fanciulli che non credono; fanciulli che, del tutto logicamente e legittimamente, fanno finta. Ma il mondo di de la Mare non è meramente un mondo di illusione; è, in tutt’altro senso, un mondo di immaginazione. È un mondo reale la cui realtà può esserci rappresentata soltanto per immagini. De la Mare non crede, in senso materiale, che vi sia un orco che striscia attorno alle case ed è respinto dall’influsso del Santo Bambino; non più di quanto Barrie creda che vi sia un immortale ragazzino che gioca fisicamente nei Kensington Gardens. Ma de la Mare crede davvero che vi sia un divorante male che è sempre in guerra con l’innocenza e la felicità; e Barrie non crede che l’innocenza e la felicità continuino ad avere un’ininterrotta legittima occupazione dei Kensington Gardens. Le storie della scuola di Peter Pan sono radiosi e ristoratori sogni; ma sono sogni. Sono i sogni di qualcuno che prende rifugio dalla vita reale in una vita interiore dell’immaginazione; ma non necessariamente di qualcuno che crede che vi sia anche una più vasta vita universale corrispondente a quell’immaginazione. Il primo è un favolista, ma il secondo è un simbolista; come se paragonassimo gli animali parlanti di La Fontaine con i tipici animali di Blake. Blake (benché certamente pazzo in modo tranquillo) probabilmente non credeva che leoni e tigri d’oro camminassero sulle colline di Albione; e La Fontaine non credeva che leoni loquaci intrattenessero chiacchierate conversazioni con le volpi. Ma Blake credeva davvero che certe tremende verità, mostrabili soltanto sotto le forme di leoni d’oro, fossero realmente vere; e, ciò che è più importante di tutto, non fossero soltanto dentro di lui, ma oltre di lui. Così la conversazione dei buffi porcellini e orsetti del signor Milne è deliziosa quanto La Fontaine, e ingannevole soltanto nello stesso senso di La Fontaine. Vale a dire, non è falsa perché è finzione; o, come si diceva, favolosa. Ma le rime del Principe Pazzo, benché sarebbero dette fantastiche, non sono meramente favolose. Il Principe Pazzo, come il Poeta Pazzo, nella persona del povero Blake, è, dopo tutto, qualcosa di essenzialmente diverso dal Cappellaio Matto. Vi sono cavi sottotoni nelle sue bizzarre domande, sull’erba verde per le tombe, che davvero riecheggiano da cose profonde e segrete come la tomba.
Many who remember the apparently nonsensical nursery rhymes which figure among Walter de la Mare’s verses for children may imagine that I am drawing a fine distinction; but it is not a distinction of degree but of direction. The parrot and the monkey who attended the dwarfs on the Isle of Lone, may seem quite as disconnected from normal natural history as the owl and the pussy-cat who went to sea. But there remains a real distinction, outside all natural history, between unnatural history and supernatural history. Mr. de la Mare’s parrots and monkeys are as symbolical as the strange beasts in the Book of Apocalypse. Only they are symbolical in a sense that means something better than the allegorical. Symbolism is superior to allegory, in so far that the symbol exactly fits; and there is therefore no superfluous explanation that needs to pass through ordinary language, or need be, or indeed can be, translated into other words. If a parrot only means speech, or a monkey only means mischief (as he generally does) then nothing beyond pictorial elegance is gained by not dealing directly with mischief, or speaking plainly about speech. And the mere allegory never gets beyond a pictorial elegance, adorning what might well be unadorned. But the great mystic can sometimes present to us a purple parrot or a sea-green monkey, in exactly such a manner as to suggest submerged or mysterious ideas, and even truths, that could not possibly be conveyed by any other creature of any other colour. The meaning fits the symbol and the symbol the meaning; and we cannot separate them from each other, as we can in the analysis of allegory. And there is a side of spiritual life, so to speak, which might well be represented by sea-green monkeys, whose colouring is not merely arbitrary colouring like that of the mysterious monsters in that admirable but purely nonsensical rhyme about the Jumblies, whose heads were green and whose hands were blue. The colour scheme here is pleasing, but it is no disrespect to the great Mr. Lear of the Nonsense Rhymes, to say that his cosmic philosophy would not have been convulsed even if their hands had been green and their heads had been blue. Walter de la Mare’s nonsense is never nonsensical in that sense. If his monkey is sea-green, it is for some reason as deep and significant as the sea; even though he cannot express it in any other way except by patient and uncomplaining greenness. And he would never mention even a green weed, a dock or nettle in a ditch, without meaning it to bear the same witness in the same way.
It is the first paradox about him that we can find the evidence of his faith in his consciousness of evil. It is the second paradox that we can find the spiritual springs of much of his poetry in his prose. If we turn, for instance, to that very powerful and even terrible short story called Seaton’s Aunt, we find we are dealing directly with the diabolic. It does so in a sense quite impossible in all the merely romantic or merely ironic masters of that nonsense that is admittedly illusion. There was no nonsense about Seaton’s Aunt. There was no illusion about her concentrated and paralysing malignity; but it was a malignity that had an extension beyond this world. She was a witch; and the realisation that witches can occasionally exist is a part of Realism, and a test for anyone claiming a sense of Reality. For we do not especially want them to exist; but they do. Now the wonderland of the other charmers of childhood consists entirely of things that we want to exist or they want to exist. Whether they are of the older English or Victorian school of Lewis Carroll and Lear, or of the later Scottish school of Stevenson and Barrie, their whole aim is to create a sort of cosmos within the cosmos, which shall be free from evil; a crystal sphere in which there shall be no cracks or flaws or clouds of evil. Peter Pan is a wonderful evocation of the happy daydreams of childhood. There is plenty of fighting and ferocity; because fighting and ferocity are among the very happiest dreams of a really innocent and Christian childhood. But Captain Hook the Pirate is not really wicked; he is only ferocious; which, after all, it is his simple duty as an honest and industrious pirate to be. But there are rhymes, even nursery rhymes, of Walter de la Mare in which the shiver is a real shiver, not only of the spine but of the spirit. They have an atmosphere which is not merely thrilling, but also chilling. They lay a finger that is not of the flesh on a nerve that is not of the body; in their special way of suggesting the chill of change or death or antiquity. To do this was against the whole purpose and origin of the fairyland of the later Victorians. Like all literature, it cannot really be understood without reference to history; and, like all history, it cannot really be understood without reference to religion. As scepticism gradually dried up the conventional religion of the English, and even of the Scotch, poetic and humane spirits turned more and more to the construction of an inner world of fancy, that should be both a refuge and a substitute. William Morris, one of the most large and humane of these later Victorians, admitted it in acknowledging the purely decorative vision in his own work:
So with this earthly Paradise it is, If you will read aright and pardon me Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.
And it is the irony of the case that these men, who were rationalists and realists about the real world, were for that very reason resolved to be radiant optimists when once they were inside the city of dreams which was their city of refuge. The pessimists insisted on having happy dreams; the sceptics insisted on having omnipotent drugs. But the mystic does not deal in dreams but in visions; that is, in things seen and not seeming. The mystic does not desire drugs but the drinking of that wine that wakes the dead; different in nature from any opiate that soothes the living.
Molti che ricordano le rime infantili apparentemente insensate che figurano fra i versi di Walter de la Mare per i fanciulli possono immaginare che io stia tracciando una sottile distinzione; ma non è una distinzione di grado bensì di direzione. Il pappagallo e la scimmia che accudivano i nani sull’Isola di Lone possono sembrare altrettanto sconnessi dalla normale storia naturale quanto il gufo e la micetta che andarono per mare. Ma rimane una distinzione reale, al di fuori di tutta la storia naturale, fra storia innaturale e storia soprannaturale. I pappagalli e le scimmie del signor de la Mare sono simbolici quanto le strane bestie nel Libro dell’Apocalisse. Solo che sono simbolici in un senso che significa qualcosa di migliore dell’allegorico. Il simbolismo è superiore all’allegoria, in quanto il simbolo si adatta esattamente; e non c’è perciò alcuna superflua spiegazione che debba passare attraverso il linguaggio ordinario, o debba, o anzi possa, essere tradotta in altre parole. Se un pappagallo significa soltanto parola, o una scimmia significa soltanto malizia (come generalmente fa) allora nulla oltre l’eleganza pittorica si guadagna col non trattare direttamente della malizia, o col non parlare apertamente della parola. E la mera allegoria non va mai oltre un’eleganza pittorica, che adorna ciò che bene potrebbe restare disadorno. Ma il grande mistico può talvolta presentarci un pappagallo purpureo o una scimmia verdemare, in un modo tale da suggerire idee sommerse o misteriose, e perfino verità, che non potrebbero in alcun modo essere trasmesse da nessun’altra creatura di nessun altro colore. Il significato si adatta al simbolo e il simbolo al significato; e non possiamo separarli l’uno dall’altro, come possiamo nell’analisi dell’allegoria. E vi è un lato della vita spirituale, per così dire, che bene potrebbe essere rappresentato da scimmie verdemare, la cui colorazione non è meramente arbitraria come quella dei misteriosi mostri in quella pregevole ma puramente insensata rima sui Jumblies, le cui teste erano verdi e le cui mani erano azzurre. Lo schema cromatico qui è gradevole, ma non è mancanza di rispetto verso il grande signor Lear delle Nonsense Rhymes dire che la sua cosmica filosofia non sarebbe stata sconvolta neppure se le loro mani fossero state verdi e le loro teste azzurre. Il nonsenso di Walter de la Mare non è mai insensato in quel senso. Se la sua scimmia è verdemare, è per qualche ragione tanto profonda e significativa quanto il mare; anche se egli non può esprimerla in alcun altro modo se non con una paziente e rassegnata verzura. E non menzionerebbe mai neppure un’erbaccia verde, un romice o un’ortica in un fosso, senza intendere che essa rechi la stessa testimonianza nello stesso modo.
È il primo paradosso riguardo a lui che possiamo trovare la prova della sua fede nella sua consapevolezza del male. È il secondo paradosso che possiamo trovare le sorgenti spirituali di gran parte della sua poesia nella sua prosa. Se ci volgiamo, per esempio, a quel racconto assai potente e perfino terribile intitolato Seaton’s Aunt, troviamo che abbiamo direttamente a che fare col diabolico. Lo fa in un senso del tutto impossibile in tutti i maestri meramente romantici o meramente ironici di quel nonsenso che è dichiaratamente illusione. Non c’era alcun nonsenso in Seaton’s Aunt. Non c’era alcuna illusione riguardo alla sua concentrata e paralizzante malignità; ma era una malignità che aveva un’estensione al di là di questo mondo. Ella era una strega; e la consapevolezza che le streghe possano occasionalmente esistere è parte del Realismo, e una prova per chiunque pretenda un senso della Realtà. Poiché noi non desideriamo particolarmente che esse esistano; ma esistono. Ora, il paese delle meraviglie degli altri incantatori dell’infanzia consiste interamente di cose che noi vogliamo che esistano o che loro vogliono che esistano. Che appartengano alla più antica scuola inglese o vittoriana di Lewis Carroll e Lear, o alla più tarda scuola scozzese di Stevenson e Barrie, il loro intero scopo è creare una sorta di cosmo entro il cosmo, che sia libero dal male; una sfera di cristallo in cui non vi siano crepe o difetti o nubi di male. Peter Pan è una meravigliosa evocazione dei felici sogni a occhi aperti dell’infanzia. Vi sono abbondanza di combattimenti e ferocia; perché combattimenti e ferocia sono fra i più felici sogni di un’infanzia davvero innocente e cristiana infanzia. Ma Capitan Uncino il Pirata non è in realtà malvagio; è soltanto feroce; il che, dopotutto, è suo semplice dovere essere, come pirata onesto e industrioso. Ma vi sono rime, perfino rime infantili, di Walter de la Mare in cui il brivido è un brivido vero, non soltanto della spina dorsale ma dello spirito. Hanno un’atmosfera che non è meramente elettrizzante, ma anche agghiacciante. Posano un dito che non è di carne su un nervo che non è del corpo; nel loro speciale modo di suggerire il gelo del mutamento o della morte o dell’antichità. Fare questo era contrario all’intero scopo e all’origine del paese delle fate degli ultimi vittoriani. Come tutta la letteratura, esso non può essere davvero compreso senza riferimento alla storia; e, come tutta la storia, non può essere davvero compreso senza riferimento alla religione. Man mano che lo scetticismo prosciugava gradualmente la religione convenzionale degli inglesi, e perfino degli scozzesi, gli spiriti poetici e umani si volsero sempre più alla costruzione di un mondo interiore di fantasia, che fosse insieme un rifugio e un surrogato. William Morris, uno dei più larghi e umani di questi ultimi vittoriani, lo ammise riconoscendo la visione puramente decorativa nella propria opera:
Così è di questo Paradiso terreno, Se leggerete a dovere e mi perdonerete Che mi sforzo di edificare un’ombrosa isola di beatitudine In mezzo al battito del mare d’acciaio.
Ed è l’ironia del caso che questi uomini, che erano razionalisti e realisti riguardo al mondo reale, fossero proprio per quella ragione risoluti a essere raggianti ottimisti una volta entrati nella Città dei Sogni che era la loro Città di rifugio. I pessimisti insistevano nell’avere felici sogni; gli scettici insistevano nell’avere droghe onnipotenti. Ma il mistico non tratta in sogni bensì in visioni; vale a dire, in cose vedute e non parventi. Il mistico non desidera droghe ma il bere di quel vino che desta i morti; diverso di natura da qualsiasi oppiaceo che lenisce i vivi.
In short, we may say that the early twentieth century presented two movements towards the fanciful or fantastical, and away from the merely rational or material: a centripetal movement and a centrifugal movement. The one spiritual spiral worked inwards, towards the secret subjective dreams of man; the other worked outwards towards the spiritual powers or truths that seemed beyond the reach of man. The new world made by the first was the great, glowing, iridescent bubble of the Barrie daydream; the world revealed by the second was that world of strange skies, at the ends of the earth and the corners of the sea, that appears in the far-off flashes of the de la Mare imagination. We might say shortly that Stevenson and Barrie could produce grisly buccaneers dripping with gore without frightening the children; whereas de la Mare could produce pollarded willows or whitewashed barns with an imminent risk of frightening the children, and even the grownup people. But it is only fair to say that there is a subtlety only possible to the first method, as well as a subtlety possible to the second. It is, as has been already suggested, the subtlety of an irony which at once accepts and discounts illusion. It is the whole point of the best work of Barrie, for instance, that somebody is deceiving himself, but also that somebody is looking on at somebody who is deceiving himself; and if they are both deceiving themselves, so much the better for the third person who is looking on from a third angle. Much of this sort of work is like a world of mirrors reflected in mirrors; the reduplication of reflection; the shadow of a shade. To name but one instance: a fairy-tale palace is itself only a fancy; but the court scene in A Kiss for Cinderella is not merely the fairy-tale fancy, but a child’s fancy about the fancy. This sort of intensive imaginative delicacy is in theory a thing of infinite possibilities; and this does belong to the merely subjective school of symbolism. But what I have called the truly symbolic school of symbolism does still belong altogether to another and, I cannot but think, a larger world. It is all that world of the powers and mysteries beyond mankind which even the sceptic would consent to cover with the celebrated label: “Important, If True”. Perhaps as good an example as can be found is in that truly extraordinary sketch by de la Mare called “The Tree”. I can imagine multitudes of quite intelligent people totally unable to make head or tail of it. It is concerned with a fruit merchant and his brother, who was an artist, and with a Tree, which is talked of in a manner utterly indescribable; as if it were not only more important than anything, but were outside the world. Now Barrie might have dealt admirably with a theme like that; and probably made the human comedy clearer. But the difference is precisely this. Even the reader who cannot understand anything else about de la Mare’s story does definitely understand this: that somehow the fruit merchant was wrong, and the artist was right; and, above all, the Tree was right. Now if Barrie had told the tale, he would have taken a gentle pride in leaving us in doubt on that very point; of suggesting that the sceptic might be the sane man, and the Tree might be a delusion. But the Tree is not a delusion.
In breve, possiamo dire che il primo Novecento presentò due movimenti verso il fantasioso o il fantastico, e via dal meramente razionale o materiale: un movimento centripeto e un movimento centrifugo. L’una spirale spirituale operava verso l’interno, verso i segreti soggettivi sogni dell’uomo; l’altra operava verso l’esterno, verso i poteri o le verità spirituali che parevano al di là della portata dell’uomo. Il nuovo mondo creato dalla prima era la grande, splendente, iridescente bolla del sogno a occhi aperti di Barrie; il mondo rivelato dalla seconda era quel mondo di strani cieli, ai confini della terra e agli angoli del mare, che appare nei lontani bagliori dell’immaginazione di de la Mare. Potremmo dire in breve che Stevenson e Barrie potevano produrre truci bucanieri grondanti di sangue senza spaventare i fanciulli; laddove de la Mare poteva produrre salici capitozzati o granai imbiancati con un imminente rischio di spaventare i fanciulli, e perfino gli adulti. Ma è giusto dire che vi è una sottigliezza possibile soltanto al primo metodo, così come una sottigliezza possibile al secondo. È, come si è già suggerito, la sottigliezza di un’ironia che a un tempo accetta e sconta l’illusione. È l’intero punto della migliore opera di Barrie, per esempio, che qualcuno stia ingannando sé stesso, ma anche che qualcuno stia osservando qualcuno che inganna sé stesso; e se entrambi ingannano sé stessi, tanto meglio per la terza persona che osserva da un terzo angolo. Gran parte di questo genere di opera è come un mondo di specchi riflessi in specchi; la reduplicazione del riflesso; l’ombra di un’ombra. Per citare un solo esempio: un palazzo da fiaba è di per sé soltanto una fantasia; ma la scena della corte in A Kiss for Cinderella non è meramente la fantasia fiabesca, ma la fantasia di un bambino sulla fantasia. Questo genere di intensiva delicatezza immaginativa è in teoria una cosa di infinite possibilità; e questa appartiene davvero alla scuola meramente soggettiva del simbolismo. Ma ciò che ho chiamato la scuola veramente simbolica del simbolismo appartiene ancora del tutto a un altro e, non posso non pensarlo, più vasto mondo. È tutto quel mondo dei poteri e dei misteri al di là dell’umanità che perfino lo scettico acconsentirebbe a coprire con la celebre etichetta: «Importante, Se Vero». Forse un esempio buono quanto se ne possa trovare è in quel davvero straordinario bozzetto di de la Mare intitolato «The Tree». Posso immaginare moltitudini di persone del tutto intelligenti totalmente incapaci di raccapezzarcisi. Riguarda un mercante di frutta e suo fratello, che era un artista, e un Albero, di cui si parla in un modo del tutto indescrivibile; come se esso fosse non soltanto più importante di qualsiasi cosa, ma fuori del mondo. Ora, Barrie avrebbe potuto trattare mirabilmente un tema del genere; e probabilmente rendere più chiara la commedia umana. Ma la differenza è precisamente questa. Perfino il lettore che non riesce a comprendere nient’altro riguardo alla storia di de la Mare comprende decisamente questo: che in qualche modo il mercante di frutta aveva torto, e l’artista aveva ragione; e, soprattutto, l’Albero aveva ragione. Ora, se Barrie avesse raccontato il racconto, avrebbe provato un gentile orgoglio nel lasciarci nel Dubbio proprio su quel punto; nel suggerire che lo scettico potesse essere l’uomo sano di mente, e l’Albero potesse essere una delusione. Ma l’Albero non è una delusione.
THE MEANING OF METRE
Did Bret Harte imitate Swinburne? Or (more pleasing thought) did Swinburne imitate Bret Harte? Did Swinburne wrestle in spirit with the admirable poem called “The Heathen Chinee”, and then start up from his reading inspired and inflamed to write the great Greek tragedy of “Atalanta in Calydon”? To some academic and pedantic minds I know that this will not appear an exact literary comparison; though it covers a small point that may be called a curiosity of literature. To them it will sound as if I suggested that John Ruskin was merely a plagiarist of Josh Billings. Anyhow, it is a rather curious coincidence that there is one particular poetical metre, consisting of a quatrain and one long line at the end, which is found nowhere else in all literature, so far as I know, except in the finest and most tragic chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta and in the poem of the Heathen Chinee. It would be possible to get quite a pleasing poetical effect by interleaving the verses of the one with the verses of the other and thus producing a complete and continuous poem, all to the same beautiful tune and combining (as only the greatest masterpieces can do) the qualities of the humanist and the humorist; the elements of the grave and gay. There is no space here to weave the whole of the two narratives together; but a verse or two will show that they move with the same melody in the same metre.
0 would that with feet Unsandaled, unshod, Over-bold, over-fleet, I had swum not nor trod From Arcadia to Calydon northward a blast of the envy of God.
Which expressions are strong, Yet would feebly imply Some account of a wrong Not to call it a lie That was worked upon William my pardner, and the same being W. Nye.
It may be urged maliciously, by the unmelodious, that the identity is a mere accident of arrangement on the page; since the long line could be divided or the short lines linked up. But this is not true. That last long rolling line is really unique, like a wave sweeping away all that went before. And the moral is that metre is not artificial but elemental; it is smooth like Niagara. That long rushing line does express the sea-worship of Swinburne; that long meandering line does express the detached lucidity of Truthful James. Since then, writers have broken writing to bits to make it explosive. The other Truthful James—I allude to Henry James—began it with a shower of commas; the more modern poets are quite capable of keeping the commas and leaving out the words. Others would make an explosion, or at least a noise, by some line like, “Burst. Blast. Burst-Blast back-blasted. Bang!” But it is not really even so noisy as a line like, “Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas”; because it somehow suggests, not a natural noise that cannot be stopped, but an artificial noise that actually is stopped, if only by full stops. Metre is more natural than free verse; because it has more of the movement of nature, and the curves of wind and wave.
CONCERNING A STRANGE CITY
Everyone has his own private and almost secret selection among the examples of the mysterious power of words, the power which a certain verbal combination has over the emotions and even over the soul. It is a commonplace that literature sometimes has a charm, not merely in the sense of the charm of a woman, but of the charm of a witch. Historical scholars question how the ignorant imagination of the Dark Ages distorted the poet Virgil into a magician; and one answer to the question, possibly, is that he was one. Theologians and philosophers debate about the inspiration of scripture; but perhaps the most philosophical argument, for certain scriptural sayings being inspired, is simply that they sound like it. The great lines of the poets are like landscapes or visions; but the same strange light can be found not only in the high places of poetry but in quite obscure corners of prose. And, in my own personal case, there are no words in literature that more directly produce this indescribable effect than a few that appear, almost accidentally, in one episode of Malory’s romance of Arthur. They occur in one of the visions of Sir Galahad; or it may be Sir Percivale, for the rest of the scene has rather faded from my memory, save for the constellation of words that shines in the midst of it. But I think that St. Joseph of Arimathea shows the knight a vision of a veiled object; presumably the Holy Grail. And he adds the sentence: “But you shall see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place.”
The soul of this, of course, escapes analysis; but for all that, an attempt at analysis has certain aspects of interest. I can only express what I mean by saying that it is the finite part of the image that really suggests infinity. Most worthy and serious people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual world. Some dismal and disgusting people, instead of saying the spiritual place, would say the spiritual plane. And the immediate chill and disenchantment of these changes is due to a vague but vivid sense that the spiritual thing has become less real. A world sounds like an astronomical diagram, and a plane sounds like a geometrical diagram; and both these are abstractions. But a place is not an abstraction, but an actuality. And the writer not only says definitely that it is a place, but he gives it a definite name like the name of a place. Sarras is not an abstraction; it is not even an allegory. It is not even as if he had said the City of Heaven or the City of Paradise. These, though not unreal, are at least universal. But the name given has identity, which is something much more intense than universality. Sarras only means Sarras, as Sarum only means Sarum, or (for that matter) as Surbiton only means Surbiton. But the very fact that we have never heard of it before, and that it is never mentioned again, that it is referred to in passing and without explanation, gives a curious intensity to the hint of something at once distant and definite. The spiritual thrill is all in the idea that the place is a place, however spiritual; that it is some strange spot where the sky touches the earth, or where eternity contrives to live on the borderland of time and space.
IL SENSO DEL METRO
Bret Harte imitò forse Swinburne? Oppure (pensiero assai più piacevole) fu Swinburne a imitare Bret Harte? Lottò forse Swinburne, nello spirito, con quell’ammirevole poema intitolato «The Heathen Chinee», per poi levarsi dalla lettura ispirato e infiammato a comporre la grande tragedia greca di «Atalanta in Calydon»? So bene che a certe menti accademiche e pedanti tutto ciò non parrà un esatto raffronto letterario; eppure esso tocca un piccolo punto che si potrebbe dire una curiosità della letteratura. A costoro suonerà come se io insinuassi che John Ruskin non fu che un plagiario di Josh Billings. Comunque sia, è una coincidenza piuttosto singolare che esista un particolare metro poetico, composto di una quartina e di un unico lungo verso finale, il quale non si ritrova in nessun altro luogo di tutta la letteratura, per quanto io sappia, se non nel più bello e più tragico coro dell’Atalanta di Swinburne e nel poema del Heathen Chinee. Sarebbe possibile ricavare un effetto poetico assai gradevole intrecciando i versi dell’uno con i versi dell’altro, e produrre così un poema compiuto e continuo, tutto sulla medesima bella melodia, che combini (come solo i più grandi capolavori sanno fare) le qualità dell’umanista e dell’umorista; gli elementi del grave e del gaio. Non v’è qui spazio per intrecciare per intero le due narrazioni; ma un verso o due basteranno a mostrare che esse si muovono con la stessa melodia nel medesimo metro.
Oh, avessi io con piedi senza sandali, scalzi, troppo arditi, troppo veloci, non nuotato né mai calcato dall’Arcadia a Calidone verso settentrione una raffica dell’invidia di Dio.
Le quali espressioni sono forti, eppur fiaccamente lascerebbero intendere qualche resoconto di un torto, per non dirlo una menzogna, che fu perpetrato ai danni di William mio socio, il quale medesimo essendo W. Nye.
Si potrà obiettare con malizia, da parte dei privi di orecchio, che l’identità non è che un accidente della disposizione sulla pagina; giacché il verso lungo potrebbe essere diviso, o i versi brevi collegati insieme. Ma ciò non è vero. Quell’ultimo lungo verso che rotola è davvero unico, come un’onda che spazza via tutto ciò che l’ha preceduto. E la morale è che il metro non è artificiale ma elementale; è liscio come il Niagara. Quel lungo verso impetuoso esprime davvero il culto del mare di Swinburne; quel lungo verso serpeggiante esprime davvero la distaccata lucidità di Truthful James. Da allora, gli scrittori hanno frantumato la scrittura in pezzi per renderla esplosiva. L’altro Truthful James — alludo a Henry James — cominciò l’impresa con una gragnuola di virgole; i poeti più moderni sono ben capaci di conservare le virgole e di tralasciare le parole. Altri vorrebbero produrre un’esplosione, o almeno un fracasso, con qualche verso del tipo: «Scoppia. Deflagra. Scoppia-Deflagra retro-deflagrato. Bang!». Ma in verità non è nemmeno così fragoroso come un verso quale: «Dove il tonante Bosforo risponde al tuono dei mari Pontici»; perché in qualche modo suggerisce, non un rumore naturale che non si può fermare, ma un rumore artificiale che effettivamente si ferma, non foss’altro che a colpi di punti fermi. Il metro è più naturale del verso libero; perché ha in sé più del movimento della natura, e delle curve del vento e dell’onda.
A PROPOSITO DI UNA STRANA CITTÀ
Ognuno ha la propria privata e quasi segreta scelta fra gli esempi del misterioso potere delle parole, quel potere che una certa combinazione verbale esercita sulle emozioni e persino sull’anima. È cosa risaputa che la letteratura possiede talvolta un incanto, non nel senso dell’incanto di una donna soltanto, ma dell’incanto di una strega. Gli storici eruditi si domandano come l’ignorante immaginazione dei Secoli Bui abbia deformato il poeta Virgilio in un mago; e una risposta alla domanda, forse, è che egli lo fosse davvero. Teologi e filosofi dibattono intorno all’ispirazione delle Scritture; ma forse l’argomento più filosofico, a favore dell’ispirazione di certe sentenze scritturali, è semplicemente che esse suonano come tali. I grandi versi dei poeti sono simili a paesaggi o a visioni; ma la stessa strana luce si può trovare non soltanto negli alti luoghi della poesia, bensì anche negli angoli più oscuri della prosa. E, nel mio caso personale, non vi sono parole nella letteratura che producano più direttamente questo effetto indescrivibile di alcune che compaiono, quasi per caso, in un episodio del romanzo di Artù di Malory. Esse ricorrono in una delle visioni di Sir Galahad; o forse di Sir Percivale, ché il resto della scena è alquanto sbiadito dalla mia memoria, salvo quella costellazione di parole che risplende in mezzo ad essa. Ma credo che san Giuseppe d’Arimatea mostri al cavaliere la visione di un oggetto velato; presumibilmente il Santo Graal. Ed egli aggiunge la frase: «Ma tu lo vedrai svelato nella città di Sarras, nel luogo spirituale».
L’anima di tutto questo, s’intende, sfugge all’analisi; e nondimeno un tentativo di analisi presenta certi aspetti d’interesse. Non so esprimere ciò che intendo se non dicendo che è la parte finita dell’immagine a suggerire davvero l’infinito. Le persone più dabbene e serie, invece di dire il luogo spirituale, direbbero il mondo spirituale. Certe persone tetre e disgustose, invece di dire il luogo spirituale, direbbero il piano spirituale. E l’immediato gelo, il disincanto di questi mutamenti, è dovuto a un vago ma vivido sentimento che la cosa spirituale sia divenuta meno reale. Un mondo suona come un diagramma astronomico, e un piano suona come un diagramma geometrico; ed entrambi sono astrazioni. Ma un luogo non è un’astrazione, bensì un’attualità. E lo scrittore non solo dice espressamente che si tratta di un luogo, ma gli conferisce un nome definito come il nome di un luogo. Sarras non è un’astrazione; non è nemmeno un’allegoria. Non è nemmeno come se egli avesse detto la Città del Cielo o la Città del Paradiso. Questi, benché non irreali, sono almeno universali. Ma il nome dato possiede identità, che è qualcosa di assai più intenso dell’universalità. Sarras significa soltanto Sarras, come Sarum significa soltanto Sarum, o (se è per questo) come Surbiton significa soltanto Surbiton. Ma proprio il fatto che non ne avessimo mai udito parlare prima, e che non se ne faccia più menzione, che vi si accenni di sfuggita e senza spiegazione, conferisce una curiosa intensità all’accenno di qualcosa a un tempo lontano e definito. Il brivido spirituale sta tutto nell’idea che il luogo sia un luogo, per quanto spirituale; che sia qualche strana località dove il cielo tocca la terra, o dove l’eternità riesce a vivere sulla soglia del tempo e dello spazio.
I wish there were a real philosophy of comparative religion, and one that was not full of inhuman nonsense. I wish it did not tend to one particular trick of unreason, as for instance when Mr. Wells says that the Christian sacrament of bread and wine was a break-back to primitive blood sacrifices. Or sometimes a man will say that the feeling about a Madonna is only the revival of the worship of Isis, or that the idea of St. Michael smiting Satan is the same as that about Mithras who slew a bull. Now there are many other more historical objections to this sort of thing, but my primary objection to it is that it not only puts the cart before the horse, but gives me directions for finding my own horse in my own stable, by looking for a primitive Mycenaean chariot of which no traces remain. Instead of explaining x by saying it is equal to 5, it undertakes to explain 5 by saying it is equal to x. It is as if a man said, “You may not be aware that your feelings about your wife are best described as those of the Missing Link at the sight of an oyster shell.” I know what a Christian feels about the idea that Michael smote a rebel angel. I do not in the least know what a Mithraist felt about the idea that Mithras killed a bull. It may really have been something like the Christian feeling, for all I know; it may also have been the worst sort of heathen feeling, for all I know. But to have the thing that I do know explained to me by the thing that I don’t know, is like nonsense out of Alice in Wonderland. It is offering something inexplicable to explain something that needs no explanation. I cannot tell whether anybody really felt anything about Isis comparable to what men feel about Mary; if anybody did, I am sure I congratulate him. But I decline to have my own feelings revealed to myself, in the light of some remote alleged feelings that no man alive has ever felt. But though there is this abyss of agnosticism between dead faiths and living ones, and between religions that are experienced and religions that are only explored, it might be possible to establish some human connection if the people who did it were more human. If they took the simple things that really are similar, instead of merely trying to assimilate the civilised things to the barbaric things, they might really bridge some of those abysses in the name of the brotherhood of men. If they were not so anxious to say that the sacrament and the sacrifice were both cannibal orgies (which is nonsense) they might say that they were both sacrifices, and had something to do with the philosophy of sacrifice, which is sense. And then, instead of having less respect for the Christians, we might have more respect for the cannibals. If they were not so anxious to compare the Virgin to a heathen goddess, they might possibly compare them both to a human mother, and at least get near to something human, if not to something divine. And in the same way, if they were not so eager to compare a shrine or a sacred soil to fetishism and taboo, they might get some sort of glimpse of what all men mean by making a deity local, or talking of a spiritual place.
At least in the mind of man, if not in the nature of things, there seems to be some connection between concentration and reality. When we want to ask, in natural language, whether a thing really exists or not, we ask if it is really “there” or not. We say “there”, even if we do not clearly understand where. A man cannot enter a house by five doors at once; he might do it if he were an atmosphere; but he does not want to be an atmosphere. He has a stubborn subconscious belief that an animal is greater than an atmosphere. In proportion as a thing rises in the scale of things, it tends to localise and even narrow its natural functions. A man cannot absorb his sustenance through all his pores like a sponge or some low sea-organism; he cannot take in an atmosphere of beef or an abstract essence of buns. Any buns thrown at him, as at the bear at the zoo, must be projected with such skill as to hit a particular hole in his head. In nature, in a sense, there is choice even before there is will; the plant or bulb narrows itself and pierces at one place rather than another; and all growth is a pattern of such green wedges. But however it be with these lower things, there has always been this spearlike selection and concentration in man’s conception of higher things. And compared with that there is something not only vague but vulgar in most of the talk about infinity. The pantheist is right up to a certain point, but so is the sponge.
Both vitally and verbally, this infinity is the enemy of all that is fine. Such philological points are sometimes more than mere pedantries or mere puns. And it is more than a pedantic pun to say that most things that are fine are finite. We testify to it when we talk of a beautiful thing having refinement or having finish. It is brought to an end like the blade of a beautiful sword; not only to its end in the sense of its cessation but to its end in the sense of its aim. All fine things are in this sense finished, even when they are eternal. Poetry is committed to this concentration fully as much as religion; for fairyland has always been as local, one might say as parochial, as Heaven. And if religion in the recognised sense were removed tomorrow, the poets would only begin to act as the pagans acted. They would begin to say, “Lo, here”, and “Lo, there”, from the incurable itch of the idea that the something must be somewhere, and not merely anywhere. Even if it were in some sense found to be in everything, it would still be in everything and not merely in all. And if men did indeed seek the secret in primitive sacrifices, it was a secret and not a superficiality like fetish-worship. If they did indeed look for it behind the veil of Isis, it was a secret and not a platitude like nature-worship. And if indeed it is better sought in another fashion, it will be a secret, and therefore a real revelation, for those who see it unveiled in the city of Sarras, in the spiritual place.
Vorrei che esistesse una vera filosofia delle religioni comparate, e una che non fosse gremita di insensatezze disumane. Vorrei che essa non tendesse a un particolare artificio dell’irragionevolezza, come per esempio quando il signor Wells afferma che il sacramento cristiano del pane e del vino era un ritorno ai primitivi sacrifici di sangue. Oppure talvolta un uomo dirà che il sentimento verso una Madonna non è che il rifiorire del culto di Iside, o che l’idea di san Michele che abbatte Satana è la stessa di quella riguardo a Mitra che uccise un toro. Ora, vi sono molte altre obiezioni più storiche a questo genere di cose, ma la mia obiezione primaria è che esso non solo mette il carro davanti ai buoi, ma mi dà indicazioni per ritrovare il mio proprio cavallo nella mia propria stalla, cercando un primitivo carro miceneo di cui non resta traccia alcuna. Invece di spiegare x dicendo che è uguale a 5, si assume di spiegare 5 dicendo che è uguale a x. È come se un uomo dicesse: «Forse non sapete che i vostri sentimenti verso vostra moglie si descrivono al meglio come quelli dell’Anello Mancante alla vista di un guscio d’ostrica». So che cosa prova un cristiano di fronte all’idea che Michele abbia abbattuto un angelo ribelle. Non so minimamente che cosa provasse un mitraico di fronte all’idea che Mitra uccidesse un toro. Può darsi che fosse davvero qualcosa di simile al sentimento cristiano, per quel che ne so; può darsi anche che fosse il peggior sentimento pagano, per quel che ne so. Ma farmi spiegare la cosa che conosco per mezzo della cosa che non conosco è come una scempiaggine uscita da Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie. È offrire qualcosa d’inspiegabile per spiegare qualcosa che non ha bisogno di spiegazione. Non saprei dire se qualcuno provasse davvero verso Iside qualcosa di paragonabile a ciò che gli uomini provano verso Maria; se qualcuno lo provò, mi congratulo di cuore con lui. Ma rifiuto di farmi rivelare i miei stessi sentimenti alla luce di certi remoti presunti sentimenti che nessun uomo vivente ha mai provato. Ma benché vi sia questo abisso di agnosticismo fra le fedi morte e quelle vive, e fra le religioni che si esperiscono e le religioni che si esplorano soltanto, sarebbe forse possibile stabilire qualche legame umano se coloro che vi si adoperano fossero più umani. Se prendessero le cose semplici che davvero si somigliano, invece di limitarsi a tentare di assimilare le cose civili alle cose barbariche, potrebbero davvero gettare un ponte su alcuni di quegli abissi nel nome della fratellanza degli uomini. Se non fossero tanto ansiosi di dire che il sacramento e il sacrificio erano entrambi orge cannibalesche (il che è un’assurdità), potrebbero dire che erano entrambi sacrifici, e avevano qualcosa a che fare con la filosofia del sacrificio, il che è sensato. E allora, invece di avere meno rispetto per i cristiani, potremmo avere più rispetto per i cannibali. Se non fossero tanto ansiosi di paragonare la Vergine a una dea pagana, potrebbero forse paragonare entrambe a una madre umana, e almeno avvicinarsi a qualcosa di umano, se non a qualcosa di divino. E allo stesso modo, se non fossero tanto solleciti nel paragonare un santuario o una terra sacra al feticismo e al tabù, potrebbero cogliere una qualche fugace intuizione di ciò che tutti gli uomini intendono nel rendere locale una divinità, o nel parlare di un luogo spirituale.
Almeno nella mente dell’uomo, se non nella natura delle cose, sembra esservi una qualche connessione fra concentrazione e realtà. Quando vogliamo domandare, nel linguaggio naturale, se una cosa esista davvero o no, chiediamo se essa sia davvero «lì» o no. Diciamo «lì», anche se non comprendiamo chiaramente dove. Un uomo non può entrare in una casa per cinque porte contemporaneamente; potrebbe farlo se fosse un’atmosfera; ma egli non desidera essere un’atmosfera. Nutre la caparbia, subconscia convinzione che un animale sia qualcosa di più grande di un’atmosfera. Nella misura in cui una cosa sale nella scala degli esseri, essa tende a localizzare e persino a restringere le sue naturali funzioni. Un uomo non può assorbire il proprio nutrimento attraverso tutti i pori come una spugna o qualche basso organismo marino; non può assumere un’atmosfera di manzo o un’essenza astratta di focacce. Qualsiasi focaccia gli venga lanciata, come all’orso dello zoo, deve essere scagliata con tanta abilità da colpire un particolare foro nella sua testa. Nella natura, in un certo senso, vi è scelta ancor prima che vi sia volontà; la pianta o il bulbo si restringe e trapassa in un punto piuttosto che in un altro; e ogni crescita è un disegno di simili verdi cunei. Ma comunque stiano le cose per queste realtà inferiori, vi è sempre stata questa selezione e concentrazione simile a una lancia nella concezione umana delle cose superiori. E, a paragone di ciò, vi è qualcosa non solo di vago ma di volgare nella maggior parte dei discorsi sull’infinito. Il panteista ha ragione fino a un certo punto, ma ce l’ha anche la spugna.
Tanto vitalmente quanto verbalmente, questo infinito è il nemico di tutto ciò che è fine. Simili osservazioni filologiche sono talvolta qualcosa di più di meri pedantismi o di meri giochi di parole. Ed è qualcosa di più di un gioco di parole pedantesco affermare che la maggior parte delle cose che sono fini sono finite. Ne rendiamo testimonianza quando parliamo di una cosa bella che ha raffinatezza o che ha finitura. Essa è condotta a un termine come la lama di una bella spada; non solo al suo termine nel senso della sua cessazione, ma al suo termine nel senso del suo fine. Tutte le cose fini sono in questo senso finite, anche quando sono eterne. La poesia è votata a questa concentrazione tanto quanto la religione; poiché il paese delle fate è sempre stato altrettanto locale, si potrebbe dire altrettanto parrocchiale, quanto il Cielo. E se la religione, nel senso riconosciuto, fosse rimossa domani, i poeti non farebbero che cominciare ad agire come agirono i pagani. Comincerebbero a dire: «Ecco, qui», e «Ecco, là», per l’inguaribile prurito dell’idea che il qualcosa debba trovarsi in qualche luogo, e non semplicemente in un luogo qualsiasi. Anche se in un certo senso si scoprisse che esso è in ogni cosa, sarebbe pur sempre in ogni cosa e non semplicemente in tutte le cose. E se gli uomini cercarono davvero il segreto nei sacrifici primitivi, era un segreto e non una superficialità come il culto del feticcio. Se davvero lo cercarono dietro il velo di Iside, era un segreto e non un luogo comune come il culto della natura. E se davvero è meglio cercarlo in altra maniera, sarà un segreto, e dunque una vera rivelazione, per coloro che lo vedono svelato nella città di Sarras, nel luogo spirituale.
THE EPITAPH OF PIERPONT MORGAN
It is obvious enough that whitewashing a man is quite the opposite of washing him white. The curious thing is that people often try to whitewash a man, and fail, when it might be possible to wash him, and to some limited extent, succeed. The real story, if the culprit only had the courage to tell it, would often be much more human and pardonable than the stiff suspicious fiction that he tells instead. Many a public man, I fancy, has tried to conceal the crime and only succeeded in concealing the excuse. Many a man has sought to bury the sin and only buried the temptation. Suppose that Nelson had covered his relations with Lady Hamilton so discreetly that he left about his movements only a vague suspicion that he had a wife in every port. We should think him a far worse man than we think him, knowing the whole truth. Suppose Parnell had kept his secret so well that his disappearances were put down to an unmarried man’s most vulgar and purchased type of vice, instead of an unmarried man’s comparatively pardonable fault of infatuation. That great man would seem far less great to us than he does now. In our craven commercial public life there are not many of the Parnell or Nelson sort: but even among our lords and millionaires there are men, I dare say, who are less despicable than they look. If we had the key of their souls we might come upon virtues quite unexpected—or at least upon vices more generous. In many a complex human scandal, I fancy, the first real slander is the acquittal.
But there is another form of this dehumanising defence: and that is the defence of the dead. The idea of observing restraint, if not respect, in speaking of the recently departed rests on a human instinct altogether deep and free: but in modern practice it is turned exactly the wrong way. A dead man should be sacred because he is a man—perhaps a man for the first time. A baby says he is a man; a boy often thinks he is a man; a man takes for granted he is a man, and often finds out his mistake. Perhaps one never knows what being a man means until the instant of death. Perhaps in a very manly and even military sense all life is a learning to die. If I were asked to say something by the grave of a man like Pierpont Morgan, I would say: “I will not remember his name. He has fought the great unequal fight; and is of more value than he was.”
Now turn to the modern newspaper method; the method of weak whitewash. The Christian Commonwealth is a paper with a perfectly genuine, though hazy and patronising, concern for social improvement. Its intentions are certainly not servile, though I think its upshot would be. But it feels as we all do, that the day after poor Morgan’s death is not the time for kicking his corpse about: so, being modern, it contrives to speak well of him in the following extraordinary fashion. “It is easy to denounce the methods by which such men amass their vast fortunes, but, making every allowance for the injury done to individuals by the often ruthless methods such men adopt to gain their ends, the great fact stands out, that they are the human agents working out certain economic movements… . These men are helping to prepare industry for a new form of control and ownership. In the transition stage they amass huge fortunes for themselves, and ruin many who are too weak to withstand them, but it is doubtful if the sum of their harmful inflections is as great as the evils in the same period caused by the great number of small competing capitalists.”
I shall have much to say of this as a social doctrine in a moment. At the start I am only concerned with it as an epitaph. In the mere matter of respect for the dead, I say this. I am ready to pass the grave of Morgan in a decent silence, as a Christian grave. The Christian Commonwealth can only think of sacrificing a thousand slaves upon it, as if it were a pagan and prehistoric grave. For to justify or palliate the capitalist today is to sacrifice a thousand slaves. My epitaph on Morgan need not even contain his name; I would write over his grave what I would over my own, “Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.” But just think how the Christian Commonwealth epitaph reads, merely as an epitaph! “Sacred to the Memory of J. Pierpont Morgan: Who, By Methods Peculiarly Easy to Denounce, Amassed a Large Fortune. Having a Preference for Ruthless Methods For the Gaining of His Ends, He Selected for Ruin Such Persons as Were Too Weak To Withstand Him. He Thus Became The Human Instrument of An Economic and Inhuman Movement. He Also Formed Trusts. For of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” That is the amount of tenderness for the terrible dead that can be reached in the modernist manner. The sacred death is forgotten, but the profane life is excused.
And now for the excuse. In order to write a polite paragraph about a poor old man whose only superiority over any of us is that he has passed what we all must fear, this paper digs up the dusty and discredited rubbish of Bellamy: and maintains the proposition that millionaires bring us nearer to Socialism. The obvious deduction for a Socialist is that he ought to be, in every hour and instant, on the side of the millionaires. No man’s wage must be increased by a penny, no man’s working day must be shortened by an hour; for this might delay the swift, sweet process by which the whole earth will soon be owned by its six most unscrupulous inhabitants. Then we shall get Socialism. I don’t see why. I never did. But it is self-evident that, if this is the case, every capitalist must be exalted and every workman brought low. The whole argument means nothing unless it means that the rich had better smash us all as soon as possible. There are some who doubt this concept. I am one of them. We say it would not have been Napoleon’s best policy to wait till the Allies had conquered him utterly, so that he might only have to write one letter, asking them to give him back the whole of Europe. We say, in our simple way, that it would not have been wise in Montenegro to wait till all the Moslems in Asia were marching upon them; so as to abolish Islam in one well-expressed proclamation. We entertain similar doubts about the sanity of making capitalists stronger than any of the past emperors of this earth, and then asking them to hand over the only thing for which they have lost their souls.
The final fact is that anyone who subscribes to this epitaph must league himself with the forces of evil until something like the Last Judgment. He must not merely give up Socialism, which is a doctrine. He must also give up Social Reform—which is a dissipation. He must not only abandon the duty of helping the poor; he must even tear from his heart the pleasure of tormenting them. I see that one paper (the name of which I forget) has even addressed an open letter to me on this matter, asking whether any of my words (which, I sadly confess, have been many) have born any fruit in practice—by which, of course, it means Westminster. Well, I am afraid I must confess that my efforts have been barren, that I have brought forth no fruit fit for the field of social reform. In all the most powerful modern movements I have been impotent. I have never segregated anybody, or tortured anybody, or unsexed anybody, or buried anybody alive—to my knowledge. I am not a philanthropist. I do not think any words of mine have led to one single man being kept in prison beyond his lawful term. I doubt if I have succeeded in adding a single lash to the torture at the triangles. I question whether I have succeeded in deducting so much as a penny from the tiny fortunes of grooms and housemaids. I have cropped no hair off the heads of other people’s daughters. I have drawn no blood from poorer men’s backs. My claim to be a Progressive is gone for ever; and I know it well. But I am not quite so bitterly opposed to all possible Social Reform as the Christian Commonwealth is. I agree that men like Morgan should be pardoned. I even agree that, for purposes of debate, men like Morgan should be excused. But I shall deny till death and damnation that men like Morgan should be encouraged. And if that epitaph does not mean that men like Morgan should be encouraged, it means nothing whatever.
L’EPITAFFIO DI PIERPONT MORGAN
È abbastanza ovvio che imbiancare un uomo sia l’esatto contrario del lavarlo fino a renderlo candido. La cosa curiosa è che spesso si cerca di imbiancare un uomo, e si fallisce, quando sarebbe stato possibile lavarlo, e in qualche misura riuscirci. La storia vera, se solo il colpevole avesse il coraggio di raccontarla, sarebbe spesso assai più umana e perdonabile della rigida, sospettosa finzione che egli racconta al suo posto. Più d’un uomo pubblico, immagino, ha tentato di nascondere il delitto e non è riuscito che a nascondere la scusante. Più d’uno ha cercato di seppellire il peccato e non ha seppellito che la tentazione. Supponiamo che Nelson avesse coperto la sua relazione con Lady Hamilton tanto discretamente da lasciare sui propri movimenti soltanto il vago sospetto di avere una moglie in ogni porto. Lo giudicheremmo un uomo assai peggiore di quanto non lo giudichiamo ora, conoscendo tutta la verità. Supponiamo che Parnell avesse serbato il proprio segreto così bene da far attribuire le sue sparizioni a quel tipo di vizio, comprato e volgarissimo, proprio dello scapolo, invece che a quella colpa relativamente perdonabile, dell’infatuazione, propria dello scapolo. Quel grand’uomo ci parrebbe assai meno grande di quanto ci pare adesso. Nella nostra vile vita pubblica mercantile non abbondano gli uomini della tempra di Parnell o di Nelson: eppure anche fra i nostri lord e i nostri milionari vi sono uomini, oserei dire, meno spregevoli di quanto sembrino. Se avessimo la chiave delle loro anime, vi potremmo scoprire virtù del tutto inattese — o almeno vizi più generosi. In molti intricati scandali umani, immagino, la prima vera calunnia è l’assoluzione.
Ma vi è un’altra forma di questa difesa disumanizzante: ed è la difesa dei morti. L’idea di osservare un certo riserbo, se non un certo rispetto, nel parlare di chi è da poco scomparso poggia su un istinto umano profondo e schietto: ma nella pratica moderna essa viene rivolta esattamente nel senso sbagliato. Un morto dovrebbe essere sacro perché è un uomo — forse un uomo per la prima volta. Un neonato dice di essere un uomo; un ragazzo spesso crede di essere un uomo; un uomo dà per scontato di essere un uomo, e spesso s’avvede del proprio errore. Forse non si sa mai che cosa significhi essere un uomo fino all’istante della morte. Forse, in un senso quanto mai virile e persino militare, tutta la vita è un imparare a morire. Se mi si chiedesse di dire qualcosa presso la tomba di un uomo come Pierpont Morgan, direi: «Non ricorderò il suo nome. Ha combattuto la grande, impari battaglia; e vale di più di quanto valesse».
Volgiamoci ora al metodo del giornale moderno; il metodo dell’imbiancatura fiacca. Il Christian Commonwealth è un periodico animato da una preoccupazione per il miglioramento sociale perfettamente sincera, benché nebulosa e paternalistica. Le sue intenzioni non sono certo servili, per quanto io ritenga che tale ne sarebbe l’esito. Ma esso avverte, come tutti noi avvertiamo, che l’indomani della morte del povero Morgan non è il momento di prendere a calci il suo cadavere: e così, da moderno qual è, riesce a parlarne bene nella seguente straordinaria maniera. «È facile denunciare i metodi con cui simili uomini accumulano le loro immense fortune, ma, tenuto conto d’ogni danno arrecato ai singoli dai metodi spesso spietati che simili uomini adottano per raggiungere i propri fini, resta ben saldo il gran fatto che essi sono gli agenti umani per mezzo dei quali si compiono certi movimenti economici. … Costoro contribuiscono a preparare l’industria a una nuova forma di controllo e di proprietà. Nella fase di transizione accumulano per sé enormi fortune, e rovinano molti troppo deboli per resistere loro, ma è dubbio che la somma delle loro nocive influenze sia altrettanto grande dei mali causati nel medesimo periodo dalla gran quantità di piccoli capitalisti in concorrenza fra loro».
Avrò molto da dire su tutto ciò come dottrina sociale fra un momento. Per cominciare, me ne occupo soltanto in quanto epitaffio. In fatto di semplice rispetto per i morti, dico questo. Sono pronto a passare davanti alla tomba di Morgan in un dignitoso silenzio, come dinanzi a una tomba cristiana. Il Christian Commonwealth non sa far altro che pensare di sacrificarvi sopra un migliaio di schiavi, come se fosse una tomba pagana e preistorica. Poiché giustificare o attenuare il capitalista, oggi, significa sacrificare un migliaio di schiavi. Il mio epitaffio su Morgan non ha nemmeno bisogno di contenerne il nome; scriverei sulla sua tomba ciò che scriverei sulla mia: «Abbi pietà di noi, miseri peccatori». Ma pensate un po’ come suona l’epitaffio del Christian Commonwealth, semplicemente in quanto epitaffio! «Sacro alla memoria di J. Pierpont Morgan: il quale, con metodi singolarmente facili da denunciare, accumulò una vasta fortuna. Avendo una predilezione per i metodi spietati nel conseguimento dei propri fini, elesse alla rovina quelle persone che erano troppo deboli per resistergli. Divenne così lo strumento umano di un movimento economico e disumano. Formò altresì dei trust. Poiché di tali è il Regno dei Cieli». Ecco a quanta tenerezza per i terribili morti si può giungere alla maniera modernista. La sacra morte viene dimenticata, ma la profana vita viene scusata.
E ora veniamo alla scusa. Per redigere un garbato paragrafo su un povero vecchio la cui unica superiorità su ciascuno di noi consiste nell’aver varcato ciò che tutti dobbiamo temere, questo giornale disseppellisce la polverosa e screditata paccottiglia di Bellamy: e sostiene la tesi che i milionari ci avvicinano al Socialismo. L’ovvia deduzione, per un socialista, è che egli dovrebbe stare, in ogni ora e in ogni istante, dalla parte dei milionari. Il salario di nessuno deve essere aumentato d’un centesimo, la giornata lavorativa di nessuno deve essere accorciata d’un’ora; giacché ciò potrebbe ritardare il rapido, dolce processo per cui l’intera terra sarà presto posseduta dai suoi sei abitanti più senza scrupoli. Allora avremo il Socialismo. Non vedo perché. Non l’ho mai visto. Ma è di per sé evidente che, se così stanno le cose, ogni capitalista dev’essere esaltato e ogni operaio abbassato. L’intero argomento non significa nulla, a meno che non significhi che i ricchi farebbero meglio a stritolarci tutti quanto prima. C’è chi dubita di questo concetto. Io sono fra costoro. Diciamo che non sarebbe stata la migliore politica di Napoleone attendere finché gli Alleati non l’avessero interamente sconfitto, così da doversi limitare a scrivere una sola lettera, per chiedere loro di restituirgli l’intera Europa. Diciamo, nella nostra semplice maniera, che non sarebbe stato saggio, per il Montenegro, attendere finché tutti i musulmani dell’Asia non gli marciassero contro, così da abolire l’Islam con un solo, ben congegnato proclama. Nutriamo dubbi analoghi sulla saggezza di rendere i capitalisti più potenti di qualsiasi imperatore del passato di questa terra, per poi chieder loro di consegnare l’unica cosa per la quale hanno perduto l’anima.
Il fatto finale è che chiunque sottoscriva questo epitaffio deve allearsi con le forze del male fino a qualcosa di simile al Giudizio Universale. Non deve soltanto rinunciare al Socialismo, che è una dottrina. Deve rinunciare anche alla Riforma Sociale — che è una dissipazione. Non deve soltanto abbandonare il dovere di aiutare i poveri; deve persino strapparsi dal cuore il piacere di tormentarli. Vedo che un certo giornale (di cui mi sfugge il nome) mi ha addirittura indirizzato una lettera aperta su questa faccenda, chiedendomi se qualcuna delle mie parole (le quali, lo confesso con tristezza, sono state molte) abbia dato frutto nella pratica — intendendo con ciò, s’intende, Westminster. Ebbene, temo di dover confessare che i miei sforzi sono stati sterili, che non ho prodotto frutto alcuno adatto al campo della riforma sociale. In tutti i più potenti movimenti moderni sono stato impotente. Non ho mai segregato nessuno, né torturato nessuno, né evirato nessuno, né sepolto nessuno vivo — che io sappia. Non sono un filantropo. Non credo che alcuna mia parola abbia condotto un solo uomo a essere trattenuto in prigione oltre il termine legale. Dubito di essere riuscito ad aggiungere una sola frustata al supplizio dei triangoli. Mi chiedo se sia riuscito a detrarre anche un solo centesimo dalle minuscole fortune degli stallieri e delle cameriere. Non ho tosato un capello dalle teste delle figlie altrui. Non ho tratto sangue dalle schiene degli uomini più poveri. La mia pretesa d’essere un Progressista è perduta per sempre; e lo so bene. Ma non sono così amaramente contrario a ogni possibile Riforma Sociale come lo è il Christian Commonwealth. Convengo che uomini come Morgan debbano essere perdonati. Convengo persino che, ai fini del dibattito, uomini come Morgan debbano essere scusati. Ma negherò fino alla morte e alla dannazione che uomini come Morgan debbano essere incoraggiati. E se quell’epitaffio non significa che uomini come Morgan debbano essere incoraggiati, allora non significa proprio nulla.
THE NEW BIGOTRY
I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right. The last occasion is one applied mostly to literature and the ability of literary men. And it is all the more like the old bigotry because it is in opposition to it.
We all know what used to happen sometimes in the Puritan period; or the more critical classicism of the eighteenth century. A young idealistic poet would write a copy of verses; mostly verses somewhat in this style:
O’er rushing waterfall and verdant grove The languid moonlight throws a light of love.
The poet was considered quite respectable; perhaps the poem was even a prize poem. Then it was discovered that the poet, when slightly drunk, had expressed doubts about the exact date of the Book of Habakkuk. There was a terrible scandal; the youth was hurled from his college as an atheist; and then the learned critics went back and looked at his poem with a new darkling and suspicious eye. The “rushing waterfall”, after all, had a very revolutionary sound and hinted at pantheistic anarchy. The phrase “languid moonlight” was an appeal to all the most profligate passions. “Light of love” was a term notoriously of loose significance.
Today it is just the opposite; only equally bigoted. A young idealistic poet, full of the new visions of beauty, writes verses appropriate to such vision; as, for instance:
Bug-house underbogies belch daybreak back-firing. Daylight’s a void-vomit; steadying legs to stump.
And all the young critics know he is all right; he has got cosmic rhythm; he is a regular guy.
And then a horrid whisper goes round that he was seen outside an Episcopal Church near Vermont. The whole horrid truth is soon known. He has admitted to a newspaper man that he believes in God. Then the young critics go back gloomily and stare at his poetry; and, strangely enough, see for the first time that there was something awfully old-fashioned in saying “daylight” when Binx might have said “sky-blank”; and, after all, bogies are just the sort of thing Episcopalians are forced by their bishops to believe in.
This, though some of the worst examples have occurred in England, is a strictly correct biography of a man of genius who has come to us from America—Mr. T. S. Eliot. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Eliot was expelled from Harvard for being a High Churchman, as Shelley was expelled from Oxford for being an atheist. Mr. Eliot’s character was not blasted by a religion until later in life, and after he had said all that can be said for modern scepticism and despair.
But this makes it all the funnier. An English critic actually accused him of asking us “to believe the unbelievable”. Whatever is the sense of calling a thing unbelievable when a man like Eliot already believes it. The author of The Waste Land knows all there is to know about scepticism and pessimism; why not admit that his beliefs are beliefs, and go back to a proper criticism of his literature?
LA NUOVA BIGOTTERIA
Noto con un certo divertimento, tanto nella letteratura americana quanto in quella inglese, il sorgere di una nuova specie di bigotteria. La bigotteria non consiste nell’essere convinti di aver ragione; questa non è bigotteria, ma buon senso. La bigotteria consiste nell’essere convinti che un altro debba avere torto in ogni cosa, per il solo fatto che ha torto in una particolare credenza; che egli debba sbagliarsi persino nel ritenere di credere in buona fede di aver ragione. Quest’ultimo caso si applica soprattutto alla letteratura e al talento degli uomini di lettere. Ed è tanto più simile alla vecchia bigotteria proprio perché le si oppone.
Sappiamo tutti che cosa accadeva talvolta nell’età puritana; o nel classicismo più rigoroso del Settecento. Un giovane poeta idealista scriveva una serie di versi; per lo più versi press’a poco di questa foggia:
Su cascata spumeggiante e verdeggiante boschetto la languida luna versa una luce d’amore.
Il poeta era ritenuto assai rispettabile; forse quei versi vincevano perfino un premio. Poi si scopriva che il poeta, quando era un po’ alticcio, aveva espresso dubbi sulla data esatta del Libro di Abacuc. Ne nasceva uno scandalo terribile; il giovane veniva scacciato dal suo collegio come ateo; e allora i dotti critici tornavano a rileggere la sua poesia con occhio nuovo, cupo e sospettoso. La «cascata spumeggiante», dopotutto, aveva un suono assai rivoluzionario e adombrava un’anarchia panteistica. L’espressione «languida luna» era un appello a tutte le passioni più dissolute. «Luce d’amore» era una locuzione notoriamente di significato equivoco.
Oggi è esattamente l’opposto; ma ugualmente bigotto. Un giovane poeta idealista, colmo delle nuove visioni della bellezza, scrive versi consoni a tale visione; come, per esempio:
Manicomio-house sotto-babau ruttano l’alba a scoppio ritardato. La luce del giorno è un vuoto-vomito; gambe che si drizzano per arrancare.
E tutti i giovani critici sanno che è a posto; ha colto il ritmo cosmico; è un tipo in gamba.
E poi comincia a correre un orribile bisbiglio: lo hanno visto fuori da una chiesa episcopaliana presso il Vermont. Ben presto si conosce tutta l’orribile verità. Ha confessato a un giornalista di credere in Dio. Allora i giovani critici tornano tetri a fissare la sua poesia; e, cosa abbastanza strana, si accorgono per la prima volta che c’era qualcosa di terribilmente antiquato nel dire «luce del giorno» quando Binx avrebbe potuto dire «vuoto-cielo»; e, dopotutto, i babau sono proprio il genere di cose in cui gli episcopaliani sono costretti dai loro vescovi a credere.
Questa, per quanto alcuni degli esempi peggiori si siano verificati in Inghilterra, è una biografia rigorosamente esatta di un uomo di genio che ci è giunto dall’America: il signor T. S. Eliot. Sarebbe un’esagerazione affermare che il signor Eliot fu espulso da Harvard per essere un anglicano dell’Alta Chiesa, come Shelley fu espulso da Oxford per essere ateo. Il carattere del signor Eliot non venne rovinato da una religione se non più tardi nella vita, e dopo che egli ebbe detto tutto quel che si può dire in favore dello scetticismo e della disperazione moderni.
Ma tutto ciò lo rende ancora più buffo. Un critico inglese lo ha accusato realmente di chiederci di «credere all’incredibile». Che senso ha mai definire una cosa incredibile, quando un uomo come Eliot già vi crede? L’autore di The Waste Land sa tutto quel che c’è da sapere sullo scetticismo e sul pessimismo; perché non ammettere che le sue credenze sono credenze, e tornare a una critica come si deve della sua letteratura?
BOOKS FOR BOYS
A recent correspondence upon what is called pernicious literature has given rise to several declarations to the effect that the popular literature which is sold to boys in our day is greatly inferior to that of two or three decades ago. At first sight a reflective person might be inclined to suggest that perhaps there were more psychological elements involved in that far-off boyish enjoyment, and in that, as in many other instances of our youthful pleasures, we were not so much enjoying the stories as enjoying ourselves. It is at least possible that the laudator temporis acti of whom we are speaking would regard the actual task of reading through those lost romances very much in the same way that he would regard the action of a waiter in a restaurant who brought him fourteen penny buns and a plate of bull’s-eyes.
The mental digestion of boys is as strong as their physical digestion. They do not heed the cookery of art any more than the art of cookery. They can eat the apples of the tree of knowledge, and they can eat them raw. It is a great mistake to suppose that boys only read boyish books. Not only do they privately revel in their sisters’ most sentimental novels, but they absorb cartloads of useless information. One boy in particular, with whose career from an early age we have the best reasons for being familiar, used to read whole volumes of Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, and of a very musty and unreliable History of English Trade. The thing was a mere brute pleasure of reading, a pleasure in leisurely and mechanical receptiveness. It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in grazing all day long.
But when all allowance has been made for the omnivorousness of youth, we incline to think that there is probably a considerable amount of truth in the idea that boys’ books have to some extent degenerated. They have degenerated probably for the reason that all forms of art degenerate, because they are despised. Probably they were less despised in the days when they still had upon them, as it were, the glamour of the great masters of historical romance. The spirit of Scott and Ainsworth and Fenimore Cooper remained in them even if it was only the reflection of a hundred reflections and each in a distorting mirror.
No one will ever understand the spirit at the back of popular and juvenile literature until he realises one fact, that a large amount of it is the result of that enthusiasm of the young reader which makes him wish to hear more and more about certain heroes, and read more and more of certain types of books. He dowers the creatures of fiction with a kind of boyish immortality. He is not surprised if Dick Deadshot or Jack Harkaway renews his youth through a series of volumes which reaches further than the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These books have the vital philosophy of youth, a philosophy in which death does not exist, except, indeed, as an external and picturesque incident which happens to villains.
The serious student of this class of books and papers will go on to observe that a very large mass of such works has arisen directly out of the interest taken in some of the creations of great masters. An irresponsible writer for boys early in the century continued the adventures of Pickwick. An interminable book of Oriental adventure which we read in our boyhood was avowedly a supplement to the Arabian Nights, and mingled Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba in one inexhaustible tale. To take a more vulgar example, it is said that “Ally Sloper” is simply an infinitely degraded version of Mr. Micawber; the literary zoologist will trace the same rudimentary organs, the hat, the tie, and the bald head. All this amounts to one of the great laws of the question, the fact that the youthful mind takes hold of certain figures, insists upon them, tears them, as it were, out of the covers of the story, and could follow their adventures in any number of day dreams. Hence one of the essential qualities of this cheap literature— its astonishing voluminousness. A library keeping a record of it would need a dome vaster than the Bodleian.
From this, as we have said, it may be inferred that there is likely enough to have been some decadence of late years, since we are becoming further and further removed from the great historical novelists, who left a kind of glow upon all historic fiction. New literary fashions have arisen, but they are scarcely likely to be imitated in the literature of boys. No publisher has yet brought out with gaudy-coloured illustrations “The Further Adventures of Jude the Obscure”. No penny dreadfuls have been devoted to what eventually happened to Pelleas and Melisande. And in this manner we reach once more the inevitable conclusion about debased forms of art; that they are debased because they are not respected. Everything in the world, from a child to a form of fiction, will be bad until we consent to treat it as good. And of all forms of literature in the world, the one most grossly neglected, from an artistic point of view, is the boys’ book of adventure.
It is a very peculiar fact, that while the educated middle-class at the present day expends infinite money and trouble upon surrounding the child with the noblest works of art and literature, the boy is in this matter treated as if he were a half-witted and inconsiderable savage. The wretched infant of four years old is expected to drink in the verses of Stevenson and the decorative curves of Walter Crane. But when he has imbibed this atmosphere, when his aesthetic hunger has by hypothesis been aroused, when his mind has developed with the rapid development of boyhood, he is suddenly put off with books and papers which are not literature at all. A child’s love for what is pretty is sedulously cultivated as the dawn of an aesthetic sense, but no one seems to realise that a boy’s love of adventure is another aesthetic sense quite equally noble and appropriate. A child’s love of colour is treated as a spiritual thing, a sort of hint of heaven, but a boy’s love of adventure is spoken of as if it were a mere brute appetite, excusable in a growing lad. If a child says, “I like the pretty flowers”, he is applauded for his poetic instinct, but if a boy says, “I like a story about pirates”, he is treated as if he had asked for another slice of pork.
As long as this view continues there can be no worthy school of adventurous fiction. It must be realised that both the child’s love of the pretty and the boy’s love of the bold are sound and admirable artistic instincts. Neither of them shows that the individual is a cherub who cannot be long for this world, but both of them show that he is a well-equipped and healthy human soul. The child in the fairy-tale is canonised for running after a butterfly. The boy in the penny dreadful is denounced for running away to sea. But the sea is more beautiful than any butterflies.
If, then, we are agreed that the first need of the problem is to understand once and for all that the love of adventure is not a temporary savagery to be satisfied, but an essential artistic tendency to be crowned and brought to consummation, it cannot but seriously affect our view of boys’ literature as a whole. We want to realise that the instinct of day dream and adventure is a high spiritual and moral instinct, that it requires neither dilution nor excuse, that it has been the mother of all great travellers and missionaries and knights errant and the patroness of all the brave. The one essential of a writer for boys is that he should not write down to them. He should rather write up, arduously and reverently, as well he may, to the mysterious spirit of youth.
LIBRI PER RAGAZZI
Un recente carteggio sulla cosiddetta letteratura perniciosa ha dato origine a parecchie dichiarazioni, secondo le quali la letteratura popolare che ai giorni nostri si vende ai ragazzi sarebbe assai inferiore a quella di due o tre decenni or sono. A prima vista una persona incline alla riflessione potrebbe suggerire che forse in quel remoto godimento fanciullesco entravano in gioco più elementi psicologici, e che in esso, come in molti altri casi dei nostri piaceri giovanili, non tanto godevamo delle storie quanto di noi stessi. È quanto meno possibile che il laudator temporis acti di cui stiamo parlando considererebbe l’effettiva fatica di leggersi per intero quei romanzi perduti press’a poco nello stesso modo in cui considererebbe il gesto di un cameriere che, in un ristorante, gli portasse quattordici focaccine da un penny e un piatto di caramelle.
La digestione mentale dei ragazzi è vigorosa quanto la loro digestione fisica. Non si curano della cucina dell’arte più di quanto si curino dell’arte della cucina. Sanno mangiare le mele dell’albero della conoscenza, e sanno mangiarle crude. È un grave errore supporre che i ragazzi leggano soltanto libri da ragazzi. Non solo si dilettano in privato dei romanzi più sentimentali delle loro sorelle, ma assorbono carrettate di informazioni inutili. Un ragazzo in particolare, con la cui carriera fin dalla più tenera età abbiamo le migliori ragioni per aver dimestichezza, era solito leggere interi volumi della Chamber’s Encyclopaedia e di una assai polverosa e inattendibile Storia del Commercio Inglese. La cosa era un mero, bruto piacere della lettura, un piacere fatto di ricettività indolente e meccanica. Era quel genere di piacere che deve provare una mucca a pascolare tutto il giorno.
Ma, fatta ogni concessione all’onnivoricità della gioventù, siamo inclini a pensare che vi sia probabilmente una considerevole dose di verità nell’idea che i libri per ragazzi siano in qualche misura degenerati. Sono degenerati, probabilmente, per la ragione per cui degenerano tutte le forme d’arte: perché vengono disprezzati. Probabilmente erano meno disprezzati nei giorni in cui portavano ancora su di sé, per così dire, l’incanto dei grandi maestri del romanzo storico. Lo spirito di Scott, di Ainsworth e di Fenimore Cooper permaneva in essi, foss’anche soltanto il riflesso di cento riflessi, ciascuno rimandato da uno specchio deformante.
Nessuno comprenderà mai lo spirito che sta dietro alla letteratura popolare e giovanile finché non si renderà conto di un fatto: che una larga parte di essa è il frutto di quell’entusiasmo del giovane lettore che lo induce a voler sapere sempre di più di certi eroi, e a leggere sempre di più di certi tipi di libri. Egli dota le creature della finzione di una sorta di fanciullesca immortalità. Non si stupisce se Dick Deadshot o Jack Harkaway rinnovano la propria giovinezza attraverso una serie di volumi che si estende ben oltre la lunghezza dell’Encyclopaedia Britannica. Questi libri possiedono la vitale filosofia della gioventù, una filosofia in cui la morte non esiste, se non, in verità, come episodio esterno e pittoresco che capita ai malvagi.
Lo studioso serio di questa categoria di libri e giornaletti proseguirà osservando che una grandissima mole di simili opere è sorta direttamente dall’interesse suscitato da alcune creazioni dei grandi maestri. Uno scrittore per ragazzi privo di scrupoli, agli inizi del secolo, proseguì le avventure di Pickwick. Un interminabile libro di avventure orientali che leggemmo nella nostra fanciullezza si dichiarava apertamente un supplemento alle Mille e una notte, e mescolava Aladino, Sindbad e Alì Babà in un unico, inesauribile racconto. Per prendere un esempio più volgare, si dice che «Ally Sloper» non sia altro che una versione infinitamente degradata del signor Micawber; lo zoologo letterario vi rintraccerà i medesimi organi rudimentali: il cappello, la cravatta e la testa calva. Tutto ciò si riconduce a una delle grandi leggi della questione: il fatto che la mente giovanile si aggrappa a certe figure, insiste su di esse, le strappa, per così dire, dalle pagine della storia, e ne potrebbe seguire le avventure in un numero sterminato di sogni a occhi aperti. Di qui una delle qualità essenziali di questa letteratura da pochi soldi: la sua sbalorditiva copiosità. Una biblioteca che ne tenesse il catalogo avrebbe bisogno di una cupola più vasta di quella della Bodleian.
Da tutto ciò, come s’è detto, si può inferire che è assai probabile vi sia stata negli ultimi anni una qualche decadenza, giacché ci allontaniamo sempre più dai grandi romanzieri storici, i quali lasciarono una sorta di bagliore su ogni narrativa d’ambientazione storica. Sono sorte nuove mode letterarie, ma è ben poco probabile che vengano imitate nella letteratura per ragazzi. Nessun editore ha ancora dato alle stampe, con illustrazioni dai colori sgargianti, «Le ulteriori avventure di Jude l’oscuro». Nessun romanzetto d’appendice è stato dedicato a ciò che infine accadde a Pelléas e Mélisande. E per questa via giungiamo ancora una volta all’inevitabile conclusione riguardo alle forme avvilite dell’arte: che sono avvilite perché non sono rispettate. Ogni cosa al mondo, da un bambino a una forma di narrativa, sarà cattiva finché non acconsentiremo a trattarla come buona. E di tutte le forme di letteratura al mondo, quella più grossolanamente trascurata, dal punto di vista artistico, è il libro d’avventura per ragazzi.
È un fatto assai curioso che, mentre ai giorni nostri la colta classe media spende denaro e fatica senza fine per circondare il bambino delle più nobili opere d’arte e di letteratura, il ragazzo venga in questa materia trattato come se fosse un selvaggio ottuso e trascurabile. Ci si aspetta che il misero pupo di quattro anni si abbeveri ai versi di Stevenson e alle curve decorative di Walter Crane. Ma quando ha respirato quest’atmosfera, quando la sua fame estetica si è, per ipotesi, ridestata, quando la sua mente si è sviluppata con il rapido sviluppo della fanciullezza, ecco che d’improvviso lo si liquida con libri e giornaletti che non sono affatto letteratura. L’amore del bambino per ciò che è grazioso viene assiduamente coltivato come l’alba di un senso estetico, ma nessuno pare rendersi conto che l’amore del ragazzo per l’avventura è un altro senso estetico del tutto ugualmente nobile e appropriato. L’amore del bambino per il colore è trattato come cosa spirituale, una sorta di accenno del cielo, ma dell’amore del ragazzo per l’avventura si parla come se fosse un mero, bruto appetito, scusabile in un giovincello in crescita. Se un bambino dice: «Mi piacciono i bei fiori», lo si applaude per il suo istinto poetico; ma se un ragazzo dice: «Mi piace una storia di pirati», lo si tratta come se avesse chiesto un’altra fetta di maiale.
Finché durerà questa concezione, non potrà esservi alcuna degna scuola di narrativa d’avventura. Bisogna comprendere che tanto l’amore del bambino per ciò che è grazioso quanto l’amore del ragazzo per ciò che è audace sono istinti artistici sani e ammirevoli. Nessuno dei due dimostra che l’individuo sia un cherubino destinato a non restare a lungo in questo mondo; ma entrambi dimostrano che egli è un’anima umana ben fornita e sana. Il bambino della fiaba viene canonizzato per aver rincorso una farfalla. Il ragazzo del romanzetto d’appendice viene biasimato per essere scappato per mare. Ma il mare è più bello di qualsiasi farfalla.
Se dunque siamo d’accordo che il primo bisogno del problema è comprendere una volta per tutte che l’amore dell’avventura non è una selvatichezza temporanea da soddisfare, bensì un’essenziale tendenza artistica da coronare e condurre a compimento, ciò non può non influire seriamente sulla nostra visione della letteratura per ragazzi nel suo complesso. Vogliamo renderci conto che l’istinto del sogno a occhi aperti e dell’avventura è un alto istinto spirituale e morale, che non richiede né diluizioni né scuse, e che è stato la madre di tutti i grandi viaggiatori, missionari e cavalieri erranti, e la patrona di tutti i coraggiosi. L’unica cosa essenziale per chi scrive per i ragazzi è che non scriva rivolgendosi loro dall’alto in basso. Dovrebbe piuttosto scrivere verso l’alto, faticosamente e reverentemente, come meglio può, verso il misterioso spirito della gioventù.
THE OUTLINE OF LIBERTY
There is a quality needed today for the spread of all truth, and especially religious truth, which is very simple and vivid, but which I find it very difficult to fit with a word. So many words have become catchwords.
I suppose that our critics, in their learned way, would have recourse to the little-known Greek word paradox, if I were simply to say that they are not quite broad-minded enough to be Catholics. In their own jargon, being broad-minded so often means being blank-minded.
If I were to say that they suffer from a lack of imagination, they might suppose (heaven help them) that I meant that what we believe is all imaginary. Nor indeed do either of these two terms define the definite thing I intend. It would be nearer the mark if I said that they cannot see all round a subject; or that they cannot see anything against the background of everything else.
The learned man, of what I may call the Cambridge type, is like a man who should spend years in making a minute ordnance map of the country between Cork and Dublin, and never discover that Ireland is an island. It is not a question of understanding something difficult. It is rather a question of opening the mind wide enough to understand something easy. It is not to be attained by years of labour; it is more likely to be attained in a moment of laziness; when the map-maker who has long been poring over the map with his nose close to Cork, may lean back for a moment and suddenly see Ireland. It is much more difficult to get such men to lean back for a moment and see Christendom.
The Catholic Church is always being defined in terms of the particular quarrel that she happens to have with particular people in a particular place. Because the Protestant sects in Northern Europe, for one or two centuries, disapproved of rosaries and incense and candles and confessional boxes, there was a widespread impression that Roman Catholics were simply people who liked confessional boxes and candles and incense and rosaries. But that is not what a Manichee or a Moslem or a Hindoo or an ancient Greek philosopher would say about Roman Catholics.
Buddhists have incense; Moslems have something very like rosaries; and hardly any healthy heathen human being on earth could conceive why anybody should have any particular hatred of candles. Buddhists would say that Catholics were people who insisted on a personal God and personal immortality. Moslems would say that Catholics were people who believed that God had a Son who assumed human form, and who did not think it idolatrous that He should afterwards assume pictorial or sculptural form. Every group in the world would have its own angle or aspect; and the Protestant would hardly recognise the same object which he had only considered in his own aspect.
Nevertheless, each of these, taken in itself, is in a sense narrow; and to dwell upon it narrows the issue. What we want is to have some general impression of the whole background of humanity, especially of heathen humanity, against which we can see the outline of the object, as, in the map of Ireland, the island is seen against the sea.
Now the real background of all that human heathenry is rather a grey background. There are particular patches, which happen to be close to us in place and time, which have been freshly painted in various ways. So freshly painted that nobody knows yet how long the colours will last. As the Imperialists wanted to paint the map red, so the Internationalists and Idealists now want to paint the map pink. But none of them has painted half so much of the map anything as they, in their optimism, have sometimes supposed. And even in the areas where a sort of official optimism prevails, as in parts of America, there is a great deal more of the old ordinary melancholy of men than anyone could gather from newspaper headlines or political programmes. And I believe that the most general philosophy of men left to themselves, and perhaps the most practical illustration of the Fall of Man, is a vague impression of Fate.
If a man will really talk to the poor, in almost any country, I think he will generally find that they are either Christians or fatalists. This fatalism is more or less varied or complicated, of course, in various places by various mythologies or philosophies. It will generally be found that the mythology is a sort of poetry, embodying a worship of the wild forces of nature; a nature-worship which, when broken up, is called polytheism, and, when united, is called pantheism. But there is sometimes very little left of theism in pantheism.
Then there are whole districts where there is true theism which is, nevertheless, permeated with a mood of fatalism. That, I suppose, is true at least of large areas of Islam. Then there are what may be called the philosophies of resignation, which probably cover equally large areas of the ancient civilisation of Asia.
We need not insist here on any controversial points against or even about these things. But I take it as certain that all those notes of recurrence and cosmic rhythm, and a cycle beginning and ending with itself, which repeat themselves so frequently in connection with Buddhism and Brahminism and Theosophy, are in a general sense allied to an almost impersonal submission to an ultimately impersonal law. That is the tone of the whole thing; and, as I have said, the tone or tint of it strikes us as rather grey; or at least, neutral and negative.
It is the same with almost all we know of the pagan myths and metaphysics of antiquity. It is a modern slander on pagans to represent paganism as almost identical with pleasure. But anyhow, nobody acquainted with the great Greek and Latin literature, even in the smallest degree, will ever dream of identifying paganism with optimism. It would at least be a great deal nearer the truth to say that there, as everywhere else, the fundamental character of paganism is pessimism. But in any case, it can quite fairly be said that it is fatalism.
Upon this grey background there is one splash or star of silver or gold; a thing like a flame. It is quite exceptional and extraordinary. Of its many extraordinary characters, this is perhaps the chief; that it proclaims Liberty. Or, as the only true meaning of that term, it proclaims Will. In a strange voice, as of a trumpet from heaven, it tells a strange story, of which the very essence is that it is made up of Will, or of a free divergence of Wills.
Will made the world; Will wounded the world; the same Divine Will gave to the world for the second time its chance; the same human Will can for the last time make its choice. That is the real outstanding peculiarity, or eccentricity, of the peculiar sect called Roman Catholics. And if anyone objects to my limiting so large a conception to Roman Catholics, I willingly agree that there are many who value it so much that they obviously ought to be Roman Catholics. But if anyone says that it is not in fact and history bound up with the Faith of Roman Catholicism, it is enough to refer him to the history and the facts.
Nobody especially emphasised this spiritual liberty until the Church was established. People began instantly to question this spiritual liberty, when the Church began to be broken up. The instant a breach, or even a crack, had been made in the dyke of Catholicism, there poured through it the bitter sea of Calvinism, or in other words, of a very cruel form of fatalism. Since that time, it has taken the much duller form of Determinism. This sadness and sense of bondage is so general to mankind that it immediately made its appearance, when the special spiritual message of liberty was silenced or interrupted anywhere. Wherever that message is heard, men think and talk in terms of will and choice; and they see no meaning in any of the philosophies of fate, whether desperate or resigned.
It is idle to talk to a Catholic about optimism or pessimism; for he himself shall decide whether the universe shall be, for him, the best or the worst of all possible worlds. It is useless to tell him that he might be more at one with the universal life as a Buddhist or a pantheist; for he knows that, in that sense, he might be more at one with the universal life as a turnip or a tree. It is his whole hope and glory that he is not at one with the universal life; but stands out from it, an exception and even a miracle.
There is a great passage in the “Paradiso” of Dante, which I wish I knew enough Italian to appreciate or enough English to translate. But I would commend it to those who may fancy that my emphasis on this exceptional quality is a mere modern whitewashing of a medieval superstition; and especially to those who have been taught in laborious detail, by learned and very stupid historians, to regard medievalism as narrow and enchained. For it runs roughly like this:
The mightiest gift that God of his largesse Made in creation, perfect even as He, Most of His substance, and to Him most dear, He gave to the Will and it was Liberty.
IL PROFILO DELLA LIBERTÀ
Vi è una qualità di cui oggi si ha bisogno per la diffusione di ogni verità, e in particolare della verità religiosa, una qualità semplicissima e vivida, ma che trovo assai difficile racchiudere in una parola. Tante parole sono ormai diventate slogan.
Suppongo che i nostri critici, alla loro maniera erudita, ricorrerebbero alla poco nota parola greca paradosso, se io mi limitassi a dire che non sono abbastanza larghi di mente da poter essere cattolici. Nel loro gergo, avere la mente larga significa così spesso averla vuota.
Se dicessi che soffrono di una mancanza di immaginazione, potrebbero supporre (il cielo li aiuti) che io intenda dire che ciò in cui crediamo è tutto immaginario. Né, in verità, alcuno di questi due termini definisce la cosa precisa che ho in mente. Sarei più vicino al segno se dicessi che non sanno vedere un argomento tutt’intorno; o che non sanno vedere alcuna cosa contro lo sfondo di tutto il resto.
L’uomo dotto, di quel tipo che potrei chiamare cantabrigense, somiglia a chi spendesse anni interi nel tracciare una minuziosa carta topografica del territorio compreso fra Cork e Dublino, senza mai scoprire che l’Irlanda è un’isola. Non si tratta di comprendere qualcosa di difficile. Si tratta piuttosto di aprire la mente abbastanza da comprendere qualcosa di facile. Non lo si ottiene con anni di fatica; è più probabile ottenerlo in un momento di pigrizia, quando il cartografo che a lungo si è chinato sulla carta col naso incollato a Cork può abbandonarsi un istante all’indietro e vedere d’un tratto l’Irlanda. È assai più difficile indurre simili uomini ad abbandonarsi un istante all’indietro e vedere la Cristianità.
La Chiesa cattolica viene sempre definita nei termini della particolare contesa che le tocca avere con persone particolari in un luogo particolare. Poiché le sette protestanti dell’Europa settentrionale, per uno o due secoli, disapprovarono i rosari, l’incenso, le candele e i confessionali, si diffuse l’impressione che i cattolici romani fossero semplicemente gente cui piacevano i confessionali, le candele, l’incenso e i rosari. Ma non è ciò che direbbe dei cattolici romani un manicheo, un musulmano, un indù o un antico filosofo greco.
I buddisti hanno l’incenso; i musulmani hanno qualcosa di molto simile ai rosari; e non v’è quasi essere umano pagano e sano su questa terra che possa concepire perché mai qualcuno debba nutrire un odio particolare verso le candele. I buddisti direbbero che i cattolici sono gente che insiste su un Dio personale e su un’immortalità personale. I musulmani direbbero che i cattolici sono gente che crede che Dio abbia avuto un Figlio il quale assunse forma umana, e che non ritiene idolatrico che egli assuma poi forma pittorica o scultorea. Ogni gruppo del mondo avrebbe la sua propria angolatura o prospettiva; e il protestante a stento riconoscerebbe il medesimo oggetto che aveva considerato soltanto nella sua propria prospettiva.
Nondimeno ciascuna di queste, presa in sé, è in un certo senso angusta; e soffermarvisi restringe la questione. Ciò che ci occorre è avere una qualche impressione generale dell’intero sfondo dell’umanità, e specialmente dell’umanità pagana, contro il quale si possa scorgere il profilo dell’oggetto, come, nella carta dell’Irlanda, l’isola si scorge contro il mare.
Ora, il vero sfondo di tutta quella paganità umana è piuttosto uno sfondo grigio. Vi sono chiazze particolari, che si trovano vicine a noi nello spazio e nel tempo, le quali sono state ridipinte di fresco in vari modi. Ridipinte così di fresco che nessuno sa ancora quanto dureranno i colori. Come gli imperialisti volevano dipingere di rosso la carta, così gli internazionalisti e gli idealisti vogliono ora dipingerla di rosa. Ma nessuno di loro ha dipinto neppure la metà di quanto, nel loro ottimismo, hanno talora supposto. E persino nelle aree dove prevale una sorta di ottimismo ufficiale, come in certe parti d’America, c’è molta più della vecchia, ordinaria malinconia degli uomini di quanta se ne potrebbe dedurre dai titoli dei giornali o dai programmi politici. E credo che la più generale filosofia degli uomini lasciati a se stessi, e forse la più pratica illustrazione della Caduta dell’Uomo, sia una vaga impressione di Fato.
Se un uomo vorrà davvero parlare coi poveri, in quasi ogni paese, credo che generalmente troverà che essi sono o cristiani o fatalisti. Questo fatalismo è più o meno vario e complicato, s’intende, nei diversi luoghi, da diverse mitologie o filosofie. Generalmente si scoprirà che la mitologia è una specie di poesia, che incarna un culto delle forze selvagge della natura; un culto della natura che, quando si frammenta, si chiama politeismo, e, quando si unifica, si chiama panteismo. Ma talvolta di teismo, nel panteismo, resta ben poco.
Vi sono poi intere regioni dove esiste un vero teismo che è nondimeno permeato da un umore di fatalismo. Ciò, suppongo, è vero almeno per vaste aree dell’Islam. Vi sono poi quelle che si possono chiamare le filosofie della rassegnazione, che probabilmente coprono aree altrettanto vaste dell’antica civiltà dell’Asia.
Non occorre qui insistere su alcun punto controverso contro queste cose, e nemmeno intorno ad esse. Ma do per certo che tutte quelle note di ricorrenza e di ritmo cosmico, e di un ciclo che comincia e finisce in se stesso, che si ripetono così di frequente a proposito del buddismo, del brahmanesimo e della teosofia, sono in senso generale imparentate con una sottomissione quasi impersonale a una legge in ultima analisi impersonale. È questo il tono dell’intera faccenda; e, come ho detto, il tono o la tinta di essa ci colpisce come piuttosto grigia; o almeno neutra e negativa.
Lo stesso avviene per quasi tutto ciò che sappiamo dei miti e della metafisica dell’antichità pagana. È una calunnia moderna sui pagani rappresentare il paganesimo come pressoché identico al piacere. Ma comunque, nessuno che conosca la grande letteratura greca e latina, sia pure nella misura più minima, sognerà mai di identificare il paganesimo con l’ottimismo. Sarebbe quantomeno assai più vicino alla verità dire che lì, come ovunque altrove, il carattere fondamentale del paganesimo è il pessimismo. Ma in ogni caso, si può ben dire con equità che è il fatalismo.
Su questo sfondo grigio v’è uno schizzo, una stella d’argento o d’oro; una cosa simile a una fiamma. È del tutto eccezionale e straordinaria. Fra i suoi molti caratteri straordinari, questo è forse il principale: che proclama la Libertà. O, come unico vero significato di quel termine, proclama la Volontà. Con voce strana, come di tromba dal cielo, narra una strana storia, la cui essenza stessa è che è fatta di Volontà, o di una libera divergenza di Volontà.
La Volontà fece il mondo; la Volontà ferì il mondo; la medesima Volontà divina diede al mondo per la seconda volta la sua opportunità; la medesima Volontà umana può per l’ultima volta compiere la sua scelta. Ecco la vera, spiccata peculiarità, o eccentricità, della peculiare setta chiamata dei cattolici romani. E se qualcuno obietta al mio limitare una concezione così vasta ai cattolici romani, convengo volentieri che vi sono molti che la stimano tanto da dover evidentemente essere cattolici romani. Ma se qualcuno dice che essa non è di fatto e nella storia legata alla Fede del cattolicesimo romano, basta rinviarlo alla storia e ai fatti.
Nessuno pose particolarmente in rilievo questa libertà spirituale finché non fu istituita la Chiesa. La gente cominciò all’istante a mettere in dubbio questa libertà spirituale, quando la Chiesa cominciò a frantumarsi. Nell’istante in cui una breccia, o anche solo una crepa, si aprì nella diga del cattolicesimo, vi si riversò dentro l’amaro mare del calvinismo, ossia, in altre parole, di una forma crudelissima di fatalismo. Da quel tempo in poi, esso ha assunto la forma assai più scialba del determinismo. Questa tristezza e questo senso di schiavitù sono così generali nel genere umano che fecero immediatamente la loro comparsa non appena lo speciale messaggio spirituale di libertà fu, in qualche luogo, messo a tacere o interrotto. Ovunque quel messaggio venga udito, gli uomini pensano e parlano in termini di volontà e di scelta; e non trovano alcun senso in nessuna delle filosofie del fato, siano esse disperate o rassegnate.
È vano parlare a un cattolico di ottimismo o di pessimismo; poiché sarà lui stesso a decidere se l’universo sarà, per lui, il migliore o il peggiore dei mondi possibili. È inutile dirgli che potrebbe essere più tutt’uno con la vita universale in quanto buddista o panteista; poiché egli sa che, in quel senso, potrebbe essere più tutt’uno con la vita universale in quanto rapa o albero. È tutta la sua speranza e la sua gloria il non essere tutt’uno con la vita universale; ma l’ergersi al di fuori di essa, un’eccezione e persino un miracolo.
V’è un grande passo nel «Paradiso» di Dante, che vorrei conoscere l’italiano abbastanza per apprezzare, o l’inglese abbastanza per tradurre. Ma lo raccomanderei a coloro che potessero immaginare che la mia insistenza su questa qualità eccezionale non sia che una moderna imbiancatura di una superstizione medievale; e specialmente a coloro cui fu insegnato, in laborioso dettaglio, da storici dotti e assai stolti, a considerare il medioevo come angusto e incatenato. Poiché suona all’incirca così:
Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza Fesse creando, e a la sua bontate Più conformato, e quel ch’e’ più apprezza, Fu de la volontà la libertate.
A NOTE ON NUDISM
There is one little habit of some of the most intelligent modern writers against which I should like to protest. It consists of flatly refusing to state somebody else’s opinion as it stands; and consider it on its own merits. The modern writer must always assume that it is a choice between his own extreme opinion and something at the other extreme. I found a curious example in a very excellent book by Miss Cicely Hamilton called Modern Germanies. She was referring to the sect of the Nudists, who have revived the ancient heresy of the Adamites and go about without any clothes, taking themselves very seriously; as if nakedness were a new invention. I think Miss Hamilton really hesitated a little, being moved by her instincts as a civilised person to laugh, and by her instincts as a progressive person to applaud. What then does she do? She immediately repeats the old story that in Paul et Virginie, the very artificial sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, the heroine is drowned because she refuses to take off her clothes. She then adds that “if she has to choose” between Virginie and some German flapper who finds it more comfortable to have no clothes to flap, she will choose the latter. But, first of all, why should she “have to choose”? Why should she not consider Nudism on its own merits; and the normal view of clothes, among sane people, also on its own merits? If I have to judge a drunkard, I will judge him without dragging in the comparison of a mad fakir who deliberately died of thirst in the desert. If I have to judge a miser, I will call him a miser; despite the possible existence of an insane and intoxicated nobleman in Vienna, who poured ten thousand gold coins down a drain. I cannot see why Miss Hamilton should call in one extravagance merely to justify another.
Next, if she really does suppose that normal, traditional or Christian morality are represented by Virginie, she is probably quite wrong. Most Christian authorities would say that her notion of sacrifice came very near to the sin of suicide. For Paul et Virginie was not written in a Christian period but in a very pagan period, when pre-Revolutionary France was in love with the pagan Stoics who did not disapprove of suicide. The story itself is largely founded on an old classical romance. It cannot be taken as typical of modern Christianity, or even of medieval Christianity. It is only fair to remember that in this sense Virginie is a heathen heroine; and Godiva was a Christian heroine.
Lastly, I am not sure I should choose the German flapper, even if I were driven to the choice. We may think a sacrifice is made to a mistaken code of honour; but there is the sacrifice; and there is the honour. We have no reason to suppose that the Nudist even knows what we mean by honour. We know nothing about her, except that she does not know what we mean by dignity. As a plain piece of practical psychology, I think it extremely likely that the poor mistaken maiden, who would die for her dignity, would also die for her country, would die for her friends, would die for her faith or promise, or any worthy obligation. We know nothing about the other woman, except that (like the pig and other animals), she feels more comfortable without clothes. It seems to me an insufficient basis for moral confidence.
UNA NOTA SUL NUDISMO
C’è una piccola abitudine di alcuni fra i più intelligenti scrittori moderni contro la quale vorrei protestare. Consiste nel rifiutarsi recisamente di esporre l’opinione altrui così com’è, e di considerarla per quello che vale in sé. Lo scrittore moderno deve sempre presupporre che si tratti di scegliere fra la propria opinione estrema e qualcosa che sta all’estremo opposto. Ne ho trovato un curioso esempio in un libro davvero eccellente della signorina Cicely Hamilton, intitolato Modern Germanies. Vi si riferiva alla setta dei nudisti, i quali hanno fatto rinascere l’antica eresia degli adamiti e vanno in giro senza alcun vestito, prendendosi molto sul serio, come se la nudità fosse una nuova invenzione. Credo che la signorina Hamilton abbia in realtà esitato un poco, sospinta dal suo istinto di persona civile a ridere, e dal suo istinto di persona progressista ad applaudire. Che fa allora? Ripete immediatamente la vecchia storia secondo cui in Paul et Virginie, quel romanzo settecentesco tanto artificioso e sentimentale, l’eroina annega perché si rifiuta di togliersi i vestiti. Aggiunge poi che, «dovendo scegliere» fra Virginie e una qualche svampita tedesca che trova più comodo non avere vestiti da sventolare, sceglierà quest’ultima. Ma, in primo luogo, perché mai dovrebbe «dover scegliere»? Perché non considerare il nudismo per quello che vale in sé, e la concezione normale dei vestiti, propria delle persone sane, anch’essa per quello che vale in sé? Se devo giudicare un ubriacone, lo giudicherò senza tirare in ballo il paragone con un folle fachiro che si è deliberatamente lasciato morire di sete nel deserto. Se devo giudicare un avaro, lo chiamerò avaro, malgrado la possibile esistenza di un nobile pazzo e ubriaco a Vienna, che ha gettato in un tombino diecimila monete d’oro. Non riesco a capire perché la signorina Hamilton debba invocare una stravaganza soltanto per giustificarne un’altra.
In secondo luogo, se davvero suppone che la morale normale, tradizionale o cristiana sia rappresentata da Virginie, probabilmente si sbaglia di grosso. La maggior parte delle autorità cristiane direbbe che la sua idea di sacrificio si accostava molto al peccato del suicidio. Perché Paul et Virginie non fu scritto in un’epoca cristiana, ma in un’epoca assai pagana, quando la Francia pre-rivoluzionaria era innamorata degli stoici pagani, i quali non disapprovavano il suicidio. La storia stessa è in gran parte fondata su un antico romanzo classico. Non la si può prendere come tipica del cristianesimo moderno, e nemmeno del cristianesimo medievale. È giusto ricordare che, in questo senso, Virginie è un’eroina pagana; e Godiva era un’eroina cristiana.
Infine, non sono affatto sicuro che sceglierei la svampita tedesca, quand’anche fossi costretto alla scelta. Possiamo pensare che un sacrificio sia offerto a un codice d’onore sbagliato; ma resta il sacrificio, e resta l’onore. Non abbiamo alcun motivo di supporre che la nudista sappia nemmeno che cosa intendiamo per onore. Di lei non sappiamo nulla, se non che ignora che cosa intendiamo per dignità. Come semplice dato di psicologia pratica, ritengo estremamente probabile che la povera fanciulla in errore, che sarebbe morta per la propria dignità, sarebbe anche morta per la propria patria, sarebbe morta per i propri amici, sarebbe morta per la propria fede o per una promessa, o per qualsiasi obbligo degno. Dell’altra donna non sappiamo nulla, se non che (come il maiale e gli altri animali) si sente più a proprio agio senza vestiti. Mi pare una base insufficiente per riporvi una fiducia morale.
CONSULTING THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA
The Historical Student will raise his refined eyebrows if I say that a Catholic is an Encyclopaedist. The name of Encyclopaedism was given in the eighteenth century to the most coldly eager of the enemies of Catholicism. And even now it is generally believed that we bow submissively before the storm of the ephemeral Encyclical, but dare not open the scientific and solid Encyclopaedia— which, by the way, is generally at any given moment much more out of date than the Encyclical.
It is none the less true that the Catholic Church presents itself, though on a higher plane and plan, in a certain double character to which perhaps the nearest natural parallel is the use of an encyclopaedia. For it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want. It advises the particular man upon his particular problem, though it were quite a private problem, almost as if it were giving private advice. And the man must be so far touched to some tinge of healthy humility, if it be only the admission that he does not know everything, and must seek outside himself for something. Even if he is so ill-advised as to consult a medical work of reference for the proper proportions of hyoscine for the poisoning of an aunt, he must be so far in a pious and respectful attitude and accepting something upon a sort of authority.
I remember a man who told me he never accepted anything on any sort of authority; I also remember asking him whether he ever consulted Bradshaw, or whether he insisted on travelling by every train first, to see whether it was safe to travel by it. The journey itself might be highly private, the visit to the aunt almost pressingly private, but he would not evolve a railway train entirely out of his private judgment.
But a work of reference works in another way also. It reminds the traveller in the train that there are a good many other trains full of travellers. It reminds the neoethical nephew that there are a good many different words in the dictionary. In his search for hyoscine he will pass carelessly over the honey of Hymettus, and think it needless to dwell on the life of Heliogabalus or the science of hydraulics. And thus he will learn the same lesson in another way; the somewhat difficult lesson that he is nobody except himself.
Those two discoveries commonly combine in a conversion; and this is perhaps the most workable framework in which to state the two chief elements of my own. There was first the relation of Catholicism to my own original and personal problem; and there was a second rather curious and illuminating illustration of the necessity of keeping it in proportion to all the other problems, the problems of all the other people.
Now all the very varied types of people who sooner or later draw near to the Catholic Faith have moved towards it from the most widely different standpoints, across most varying distances, and rejecting or renewing or reshaping the most queerly contrasted types of non-Catholic thought. My own thought, when it was not yet Catholic, was often blasted with the name of Optimist; but it was not quite so bad as that sounds today. It was an attempt to hold on to religion by the thread of thanks for our creation; by the praise of existence and of created things. And the curious part of it is that I found that this piece of private judgment, or private nonsense, was really much more true than I ever thought it was; and yet, if that truth were left to stand alone, it would be a complete falsehood.
For the sake of illustration, or in a rather special sense of illumination, I will take the metaphor of a window; a thing which always had, and still has, an almost weirdly vivid effect on my own imagination. My own original view, which would originally have been an entirely non-Catholic if not anti-Catholic view, might be roughly stated thus. “After all, what could be more mystical or magical than ordinary daylight coming in through an ordinary window? Why should anybody want a new heaven shining on a new earth; why need they dream of strange stars or miraculous flames, or the sun and moon turned to blood and darkness, in order to imagine a portent? The mere fact of existence and experience is a perpetual portent. Why should we ever ask for more?”
There is an old literary joke or game, familiar I think among the transcendental tricks of the Cavalier poets; a game that is called echo verses. It is a sort of punning upon the last syllable of a word; by which Echo is made to answer mockingly the question asked in the line of verse. Thus, to transfer it to a modern topic, the poet might ask, “Say, what high hope is founded on eugenics?” And the obliging echo would answer, “Nix”; or a paean in praise of some Socialist or ex-Socialist statesman would begin with the line, “Labour’s great leader; mighty Democrat”, and end with the repetition, “Rat”.
I am haunted by this parallel in the curious logical answer to my own question; which was at once a repetition and a contradiction and a completion. For it seemed to me that when I asked that question, “Why is not the daylight enough?” the ancient voice of some mystery such as an old religion answered my words merely by repeating them, “Why is not the daylight enough?” And when I said, “Why should not that wonderful white fire, breaking through the window, inspire us every day like an ever-returning miracle?” the echo out of that old crypt or cavern only answered, “Why not indeed?”
And, the more I thought of it, the more I thought that there was the hint of some strange answer in the very fact that I had to ask the question. I had not lost, and I have never lost, the conviction that such primal things are mysterious and amazing; but if they were amazing, why did anybody have to remind us that they were amazing? Why was there, as I had already realised that there certainly was, a sort of daily fight to appreciate the daylight; to which we had to summon all imagination and poetry and the labour of the arts to aid us? If the first imaginative instinct was right, it seemed clearer and clearer that something else was wrong. And as I indignantly denied that there was anything wrong with the window, I eventually concluded that there was something wrong with me.
In this case, the divine dictionary had answered my own personal question as directly and even personally as if the answer had been written for me. It justified the instinct that inspired me to accept the daylight as a divine reality; but it also solved the problem that puzzled me about the difficulty of thus accepting the daylight all day and every day. Creation was of the Creator and declared as good; the power in it could be praised by angels forever and by the sons of God shouting for joy. If we were ourselves only occasionally overheard in the act of shouting for joy, it was because we were only partially or imperfectly the sons of God; not indeed wholly disinherited, but not wholly domesticated. In short, we suffered by the Fall or Original Sin; but it is important to note that this is not an answer to the particular question, except in the form of the more moderate Catholic doctrine, and not the old pessimist Protestant doctrine of the Fall.
This particular problem arose entirely out of the fact that man is imperfect; but not, in the pessimist sense, perfectly imperfect. The whole paradox is in the fact that a part of his mind remains almost perfect; and he can perpetually perceive what he cannot perpetually enjoy. I was as certain that existence is ecstatically more excellent than non-existence as I was that plus two is different from minus two. Only there is a practical psychological difficulty about always going into ecstasies over this fact. Man is not symmetrically unsymmetrical; he is a sort of one-eyed creature ever since he fought a duel with the devil; and the one eye sees the eternal light eternally, while the other has grown tired and blinks or is almost blind. Thus the authority solved this private problem, not by denying the truth of my private judgment, but by adding to it the larger and more general judgment of the Fall.
And then, in the very act of understanding my own little private problem, I understood the public authority which I have compared to an encyclopaedia. Here there were thousands of other private problems solved for thousands of other private persons; masses of them had nothing to do with my own case at all; but one of them turned and confronted my own case in a curious way. I began to realize that it would not do to act as so many of the most brilliant men of my time had acted. It was not enough for a man to value a truth merely because he had picked it up by himself; to take it away with him and turn it into a private system; at the best into a philosophy and at the worst into a sect. He was very proud of answering his own question without the help of an encyclopaedia; but he did not even pretend to answer all the other questions in the encyclopaedia.
Now I felt very strongly that there ought to be answers, not only to all the other questions which all the other people were asking, but also answers to other questions which I should ask myself. And the moment I began to think about these other problems I saw at once that I could not even satisfy myself with the solution of one of those problems. The practical example which occurred to me was this. I said to myself; it is all very well to say that the miracle of daylight coming through a window ought to be enough to make a man dance with joy. But suppose another man uses your argument as a justification for putting innocent men in prison for life, in a cell with one window, and then leaving them to dance. What will become of all your own denunciations of slavery and the oppression of the poor, when that highly practical statesman has founded a new commonwealth on your new creed?
And then I think there spread out before me, like a vast dazzling plan with innumerable details, some vision of the thousand things that have to be interrelated and balanced in Catholic thought; justice as well as joy; liberty as well as light; and I felt certain that the mere proportion of all these things, not the negation of any of them, needed, to harmonize it and hold it steady, a power and a presence mightier than the mind of any mortal man.
CONSULTANDO L’ENCICLOPEDIA
Lo Studioso di storia inarcherà le sue sopracciglia raffinate se dirò che un cattolico è un enciclopedista. Il nome di enciclopedismo fu dato nel Settecento ai più freddamente zelanti fra i nemici del cattolicesimo. E persino oggi si crede comunemente che noi ci inchiniamo sottomessi dinanzi alla tempesta dell’effimera enciclica, ma non osiamo aprire la scientifica e solida enciclopedia — la quale, sia detto per inciso, in un qualsiasi momento dato è di norma assai più fuori moda dell’enciclica stessa.
Non è per questo meno vero che la Chiesa cattolica si presenta, benché su un piano e un disegno più alti, con un certo duplice carattere di cui forse il parallelo naturale più prossimo è l’uso di un’enciclopedia. Poiché è la prova del valore di una buona enciclopedia che essa faccia due cose alquanto diverse in una volta sola. L’uomo che la consulta trova la cosa che cerca; e trova insieme quante migliaia di cose ci siano che egli non cerca affatto. Essa consiglia il singolo uomo sul suo singolo problema, fosse pure un problema del tutto privato, quasi come se gli desse un consiglio riservato. E l’uomo dev’essere fino a quel punto toccato da qualche sfumatura di sana umiltà, non foss’altro che nell’ammettere di non sapere ogni cosa, e di dover cercare fuori di sé qualcosa. Perfino se è tanto mal consigliato da consultare un’opera di medicina per le giuste dosi di ioscina con cui avvelenare una zia, egli deve pur trovarsi fino a quel punto in un atteggiamento pio e rispettoso, accettando qualcosa in virtù di una sorta di autorità.
Ricordo un uomo che mi disse di non accettare mai nulla in virtù di nessuna sorta di autorità; ricordo anche di avergli chiesto se consultasse mai il Bradshaw, oppure se pretendesse di viaggiare prima con ogni treno, per vedere se fosse sicuro viaggiarci. Il viaggio in sé poteva essere del tutto privato, la visita alla zia quasi impellentemente privata, ma egli non avrebbe fatto scaturire un treno interamente dal suo giudizio privato.
Ma un’opera di consultazione opera anche in un altro modo. Ricorda al viaggiatore in treno che vi sono parecchi altri treni gremiti di viaggiatori. Ricorda al neoetico nipote che vi sono parecchie parole diverse nel dizionario. Nella sua ricerca della ioscina egli scorrerà con distrazione sul miele dell’Imetto, e riterrà superfluo indugiare sulla vita di Eliogabalo o sulla scienza dell’idraulica. E così apprenderà la medesima lezione per un’altra via; la lezione alquanto ardua di non essere nessun altro se non se stesso.
Quelle due scoperte comunemente si combinano in una conversione; e questa è forse la cornice più maneggevole entro cui esporre i due elementi principali della mia. Vi fu anzitutto il rapporto del cattolicesimo con il mio proprio problema originario e personale; e vi fu una seconda illustrazione, alquanto curiosa e illuminante, della necessità di tenerlo in proporzione con tutti gli altri problemi, i problemi di tutte le altre persone.
Ora, tutti i tipi assai svariati di persone che presto o tardi si accostano alla Fede cattolica vi si sono mossi incontro dai punti di vista più diversi, attraverso le distanze più varie, respingendo o rinnovando o rimodellando i tipi più stranamente contrastanti di pensiero non cattolico. Il mio proprio pensiero, quando non era ancora cattolico, fu spesso bollato col nome di ottimismo; ma non era poi così cattivo come suona oggi. Era un tentativo di tenermi aggrappato alla religione mediante il filo della gratitudine per la nostra creazione; mediante la lode dell’esistenza e delle cose create. E la parte curiosa è che scoprii come questo pezzo di giudizio privato, o di privata insensatezza, fosse in realtà assai più vero di quanto avessi mai pensato; e tuttavia, se quella verità fosse lasciata a reggersi da sola, sarebbe una completa falsità.
A titolo di illustrazione, o in un senso alquanto speciale di illuminazione, prenderò la metafora di una finestra; una cosa che ebbe sempre, e ha tuttora, un effetto quasi stranamente vivido sulla mia immaginazione. La mia veduta originaria, che in origine sarebbe stata una veduta interamente non cattolica se non anticattolica, potrebbe grosso modo enunciarsi così. «Dopo tutto, cosa potrebbe esserci di più mistico o magico della comune luce del giorno che entra attraverso una comune finestra? Perché mai qualcuno dovrebbe volere un cielo nuovo che risplenda su una terra nuova; perché avrebbe bisogno di sognare stelle strane o fiamme miracolose, o il sole e la luna mutati in sangue e in tenebra, per immaginare un prodigio? Il mero fatto dell’esistenza e dell’esperienza è un prodigio perpetuo. Perché mai dovremmo chiedere di più?»
C’è un vecchio gioco o scherzo letterario, familiare credo tra i trucchi trascendentali dei poeti cavalieri; un gioco che si chiama versi a eco. È una sorta di bisticcio sull’ultima sillaba di una parola; per cui l’Eco è indotta a rispondere beffardamente alla domanda posta nel verso. Così, per trasferirlo a un tema moderno, il poeta potrebbe chiedere: «Dimmi, quale alta speranza si fonda sull’eugenetica?» E l’Eco compiacente risponderebbe: «Nix»; oppure un peana in lode di qualche statista socialista o ex socialista comincerebbe col verso «Grande capo dei Lavoratori; possente democratico», e finirebbe con la ripetizione: «Ratto».
Sono ossessionato da questo parallelo nella curiosa risposta logica alla mia stessa domanda; risposta che fu insieme una ripetizione e una contraddizione e un compimento. Poiché mi parve che, quando posi quella domanda — «Perché la luce del giorno non basta?» — l’antica voce di qualche mistero, come quella di una vecchia religione, rispondesse alle mie parole semplicemente ripetendole: «Perché la luce del giorno non basta?». E quando dissi: «Perché quel meraviglioso fuoco bianco, che irrompe attraverso la finestra, non dovrebbe ispirarci ogni giorno come un miracolo che sempre ritorna?», l’eco che veniva da quella vecchia cripta o caverna rispose soltanto: «E perché no, davvero?».
E quanto più vi riflettevo, tanto più mi pareva che vi fosse il cenno di qualche strana risposta nel fatto stesso che io dovessi porre la domanda. Non avevo perduto, e non ho mai perduto, la convinzione che tali cose primordiali siano misteriose e sbalorditive; ma se erano sbalorditive, perché qualcuno doveva rammentarci che erano sbalorditive? Perché c’era, come già mi ero reso conto che certamente c’era, una specie di lotta quotidiana per apprezzare la luce del giorno; una lotta a cui dovevamo chiamare in aiuto tutta l’immaginazione e la poesia e la fatica delle arti? Se il primo istinto immaginativo era giusto, appariva sempre più chiaro che qualcos’altro era sbagliato. E mentre negavo indignato che vi fosse alcunché di sbagliato nella finestra, conclusi alla fine che vi era qualcosa di sbagliato in me.
In questo caso, il divino dizionario aveva risposto alla mia domanda personale in modo tanto diretto e persino tanto personale come se la risposta fosse stata scritta apposta per me. Giustificava l’istinto che mi ispirava ad accettare la luce del giorno come una realtà divina; ma risolveva anche il problema che mi lasciava perplesso circa la difficoltà di accettare così la luce del giorno tutto il giorno e ogni giorno. La creazione veniva dal Creatore ed era dichiarata buona; la potenza che è in essa poteva essere lodata dagli angeli in eterno e dai figli di Dio esultanti di gioia. Se noi stessi venivamo sorpresi solo di quando in quando nell’atto di gridare di gioia, era perché eravamo solo parzialmente o imperfettamente figli di Dio; non del tutto diseredati, invero, ma neppure del tutto addomesticati. In breve, soffrivamo per la Caduta, ovvero il Peccato originale; ma è importante notare che questa non è una risposta al problema particolare, se non nella forma della più moderata dottrina cattolica, e non nella vecchia dottrina protestante e pessimista della Caduta.
Questo problema particolare nasceva interamente dal fatto che l’uomo è imperfetto; ma non, nel senso pessimista, perfettamente imperfetto. L’intero paradosso sta nel fatto che una parte della sua mente rimane quasi perfetta; ed egli può perpetuamente percepire ciò di cui non può perpetuamente godere. Ero certo che l’esistenza sia estaticamente più eccellente della non esistenza, così com’ero certo che più due è diverso da meno due. Solo che c’è una difficoltà psicologica e pratica nell’andare sempre in estasi per questo fatto. L’uomo non è simmetricamente asimmetrico; è una sorta di creatura con un occhio solo da quando combatté un duello col diavolo; e l’unico occhio vede eternamente la luce eterna, mentre l’altro si è stancato e sbatte le palpebre o è quasi cieco. Così l’autorità risolse questo problema privato, non negando la verità del mio giudizio privato, ma aggiungendovi il più ampio e più generale giudizio della Caduta.
E allora, nell’atto stesso di comprendere il mio piccolo problema privato, compresi la pubblica autorità che ho paragonato a un’enciclopedia. Qui vi erano migliaia di altri problemi privati risolti per migliaia di altre persone private; masse di essi non avevano nulla a che fare col mio caso; ma uno di essi si volse e affrontò il mio caso in un modo curioso. Cominciai a rendermi conto che non sarebbe andata bene agire come tanti fra gli uomini più brillanti del mio tempo avevano agito. Non bastava che un uomo apprezzasse una verità solo perché l’aveva raccolta da sé; per portarla via con sé e mutarla in un sistema privato; nel migliore dei casi in una filosofia e nel peggiore in una setta. Era assai fiero di aver risposto alla propria domanda senza l’aiuto di un’enciclopedia; ma non pretendeva nemmeno di rispondere a tutte le altre domande dell’enciclopedia.
Ora io sentivo con gran forza che dovevano esserci delle risposte, non solo a tutte le altre domande che tutte le altre persone andavano ponendo, ma anche risposte ad altre domande che io stesso avrei dovuto pormi. E nel momento in cui cominciai a pensare a questi altri problemi, vidi subito che non potevo nemmeno appagarmi della soluzione di uno solo di quei problemi. L’esempio pratico che mi venne in mente fu questo. Dissi a me stesso: va tutto molto bene dire che il miracolo della luce del giorno che entra attraverso una finestra dovrebbe bastare a far danzare un uomo di gioia. Ma supponi che un altro uomo si serva del tuo argomento come giustificazione per mettere uomini innocenti in prigione a vita, in una cella con una sola finestra, e poi li lasci lì a danzare. Che ne sarà di tutte le tue denunce della schiavitù e dell’oppressione dei poveri, quando quello statista assai pratico avrà fondato un nuovo Stato sul tuo nuovo credo?
E allora mi parve che si dispiegasse dinanzi a me, come un vasto e abbagliante disegno dagli innumerevoli particolari, una qualche visione delle mille cose che devono essere interrelate ed equilibrate nel pensiero cattolico; la giustizia non meno della gioia; la libertà non meno della luce; e sentii con certezza che la mera proporzione di tutte queste cose, non la negazione di alcuna di esse, richiedeva, per armonizzarla e tenerla salda, una potenza e una presenza più possenti della mente di qualsiasi uomo mortale.
IF I HAD ONLY ONE SERMON TO PREACH
If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
Now the first fact to note about this notion is a rather curious one. Of all such notions, it is the one most generally dismissed in theory and most universally accepted in practice. Modern men imagine that such a theological idea is quite remote from them; and, stated as a theological idea, it probably is remote from them. But, as a matter of fact, it is too close to them to be recognised. It is so completely a part of their minds and morals and instincts, I might almost say of their bodies, that they take it for granted and act on it even before they think of it. It is actually the most popular of all moral ideas; and yet it is almost entirely unknown as a moral idea. No truth is now so unfamiliar as a truth, or so familiar as a fact.
Let us put the fact to a trifling but not unpleasing test. Let us suppose that the reader, or (preferably) the writer, is going into a public-house or some public place of social intercourse; a public tube or tram might do as well, except that it seldom allows of such long and philosophical intercourse as did the old public house. Anyhow, let us suppose any place where men of motley but ordinary types assemble; mostly poor because the majority is poor some moderately comfortable but rather what is snobbishly called common; an average handful of human beings. Let us suppose that the enquirer, politely approaching this group, opens the conversation in a chatty way by saying, “Theologians are of opinion that it was one of the superior angelic intelligences seeking to become the supreme object of worship, instead of finding his natural joy in worshipping, which dislocated the providential design and frustrated the full joy and completion of the cosmos”. After making these remarks the enquirer will gaze round brightly and expectantly at the company for corroboration, at the same time ordering such refreshments as may be ritually fitted to the place or time, or perhaps merely offering cigarettes or cigars to the whole company, to fortify them against the strain. In any case, we may well admit that such a company will find it something of a strain to accept the formula in the above form. Their comments will probably be disjointed and detached; whether they take the form of “Lorlumme” (a beautiful thought slurred somewhat in pronunciation), or even “Gorblimme” (an image more sombre but fortunately more obscure), or merely the unaffected form of “Garn”; a statement quite free from doctrinal and denominational teaching, like our State compulsory education. In short, he who shall attempt to state this theory as a theory to the average crowd of the populace will doubtless find that he is talking in an unfamiliar language. Even if he states the matter in the simplified form, that Pride is the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, he will only produce a vague and rather unfavourable impression that he is preaching. But he is only preaching what everybody else is practising; or at least is wanting everybody else to practise.
Let the scientific enquirer continue to cultivate the patience of science. Let him linger—at any rate let me linger— in the place of popular entertainment whatever it may be, and take very careful note (if necessary in a note-book) of the way in which ordinary human beings do really talk about each other. As he is a scientific enquirer with a note-book, it is very likely that he never saw any ordinary human beings before. But if he will listen carefully, he will observe a certain tone taken towards friends, foes and acquaintances; a tone which is, on the whole, creditably genial and considerate, though not without strong likes and dislikes. He will hear abundant if sometimes bewildering allusion to the well-known weaknesses of Old George; but many excuses also, and a certain generous pride in conceding that Old George is quite the gentleman when drunk, or that he told the policeman off proper. Some celebrated idiot, who is always spotting winners that never win, will be treated with almost tender derision; and, especially among the poorest, there will be a true Christian pathos in the reference to those who have been “in trouble” for habits like burglary and petty larceny. And as all these queer types are called up like ghosts by the incantation of gossip, the enquirer will gradually form the impression that there is one kind of man, probably only one kind of man, perhaps, only one man, who is really disliked. The voices take on quite a different tone in speaking of him; there is a hardening and solidification of disapproval and a new coldness in the air. And this will be all the more curious because, by the current modern theories of social or anti-social action, it will not be at all easy to say why he should be such a monster; or what exactly is the matter with him. It will be hinted at only in singular figures of speech, about a gentleman who is mistakenly convinced that he owns the street; or sometimes that be owns the earth. Then one of the social critics will say, “‘E comes in ‘ere and ‘e thinks ‘e’s Gawd Almighty.” Then the scientific enquirer will shut his note-book with a snap and retire from the scene, possibly after paying for any drinks he may have consumed in the cause of social science. He has got what he wanted. He has been intellectually justified. The man in the pub has precisely repeated, word for word, the theological formula about Satan.
Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices. This is what is felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty. And we all do in fact know that the primary sin of pride has this, curiously freezing and hardening effect upon the other sins. A man may be very susceptible and in sex matters rather loose; he may waste himself on passing and unworthy passions, to the hurt of his soul; and yet always retain something which makes friendship with his own sex at least possible, and even faithful and satisfying. But once let that sort of man regard his own weakness as a strength, and you have somebody entirely different. You have the Lady-Killer; the most beastly of all possible bounders; the man whom his own sex almost always has the healthy instinct to hate and despise. A man may be naturally slothful and rather irresponsible; he may neglect many duties through carelessness, and his friends may still understand him, so long as it is really a careless carelessness. But it is the devil and all when it becomes a careful carelessness. It is the devil and all when he becomes a deliberate and self-conscious Bohemian, sponging on principle, preying on society in the name of his own genius (or rather of his own belief in his own genius) taxing the world like a king on the plea that he is a poet, and despising better men than himself who work that he may waste. It is no metaphor to say that it is the devil and all. By the same fine old original religious formula, it is all of the devil. We could go through any number of social types illustrating the same spiritual truth. It would be easy to point out that even the miser, who is half-ashamed of his madness, is a more human and sympathetic type than the millionaire who brags and boasts of his avarice and calls it sanity and simplicity and the strenuous life. It would be easy to point out that even cowardice, as a mere collapse of the nerves, is better than cowardice as an ideal and theory of the intellect; and that a really imaginative person will have more sympathy with men who, like cattle, yield to what they know is panic, than with a certain particular type of prig who preaches something that he calls peace. Men hate priggishness because it is the driest form of pride.
Thus there is a paradox in the whole position. The spiritual idea of the evil of pride, especially spiritual pride, was dismissed as a piece of mysticism not needed by modern morality, which is to be purely social and practical. And, as a fact, it is very specially needed because the morality is social and practical. On the assumption that we need care for nothing except making other human beings happy, this is quite certainly the thing that will make them unhappy. The practical case against pride, as a mere source of social discomfort and discord, is if possible even more self-evident than the more mystical case against it, as a setting up of the self against the soul of the world. And yet though we see this thing on every side in modern life, we really hear very little about it in modern literature and ethical theory. Indeed, a great deal of modern literature and ethics might be meant specially for the encouragement of spiritual pride. Scores of scribes and sages are busy writing about the importance of self-culture and self-realisation; about how every child is to be taught to develop his personality (whatever that may be); about how every man must devote himself to success, and every successful man must devote himself to developing a magnetic and compelling personality; about how every man may become a superman (by taking Our Correspondence Course) or, in the more sophisticated and artistic type of fiction, how one specially superior superman can learn to look down on the mere mob of ordinary supermen, who form the population of that peculiar world. Modern theory, as a whole, is rather encouraging egoism. But we need not be alarmed about that. Modern practice, being exactly like ancient practice, is still heartily discouraging it. The man with the strong magnetic personality is still the man whom those who know him best desire most warmly to kick out of the club. The man in a really acute stage of self-realisation is a no more pleasing object in the club than in the pub. Even the most enlightened and scientific sort of club can see through the superman; and see that he has become a bore. It is in practice that the philosophy of pride breaks down; by the test of the moral instincts of man wherever two or three are gathered together; and it is the mere experience of modern humanity that answers the modern heresy.
There is indeed another practical experience, known to us all, even more pungent and vivid than the actual unpopularity of the bully or the bumptious fool. We all know that there is a thing called egoism that is much deeper than egotism. Of all spiritual diseases it is the most intangible and the most intolerable. It is said to be allied to hysteria; it sometimes looks as if it were allied to diabolic possession. It is that condition in which the victim does a thousand varying things from one unvarying motive of a devouring vanity; and sulks or smiles, slanders or praises, conspires and intrigues or sits still and does nothing, all in one unsleeping vigilance over the social effect of one single person. It is amazing to me that in the modern world, that chatters perpetually about psychology and sociology, about the tyranny with which we are threatened by a few feeble-minded infants, about alcoholic poisoning and the treatment of neurotics, about half a hundred things that are near the subject and never on the spot— it is amazing that these moderns really have so very little to say about the cause and cure of a moral condition that poisons nearly every family and every circle of friends. There is hardly a practical psychologist who has anything to say about it that is half so illuminating as the literal exactitude of the old maxim of the priest; that pride is from hell. For there is something awfully vivid and appallingly fixed, about this madness at its worst, that makes that short and antiquated word seem much more apt than any other. And then, as I say, the learned go wandering away into discourses about drink or tobacco, about the wickedness of wine glasses or the incredible character of public-houses. The wickedest work in this world is symbolised not by a wine glass but by a looking-glass; and it is not done in public-houses;, but in the most private of all private houses which is a house of mirrors.
The phrase would probably be misunderstood; but I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves. I should tell them to enjoy dances and theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but never to learn to enjoy themselves. Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside. So long as they have this they have as the greatest minds have always declared, a something that is present in childhood and which can still preserve and invigorate manhood. The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair.
Difficulties can easily be raised, of course, in any such debate by the accident of words being used in different senses; and sometimes in quite contrary senses. For instance, when we speak of somebody being “proud of” something, as of a man being proud of his wife or a people proud of its heroes, we really mean something that is the very opposite of pride. For it implies that the man thinks that something outside himself is needed to give him great glory; and such a glory is really acknowledged as a gift. In the same way, the word will certainly be found misleading, if I say that the worst and most depressing element in the mixed elements of the present and the immediate future, seems to me to be an element of impudence. For there is a kind of impudence that we all find either amusing or bracing; as in the impudence of the guttersnipe. But there again the circumstances disarm the thing of its real evil. The quality commonly called “cheek” is not an assertion of superiority; but rather a bold attempt to balance inferiority. When you walk up to a very wealthy and powerful nobleman and playfully tip his hat over his eyes (as is your custom) you are not suggesting that you yourself are above all human follies, but rather that you are capable of them, and that he also ought to have a wider and richer experience of them. When you dig a Royal Duke in the waistcoat, in your playful manner, you are not taking yourself too seriously, but only, perhaps, not taking him so seriously as is usually thought correct. This sort of impudence may be open to criticism, as it is certainly subject to dangers. But there is a sort of hard intellectual impudence, which really treats itself as intangible to retort or judgment; and there are a certain number among the new generations and social movements, who fall into this fundamental weakness. It is a weakness; for it is simply settling down permanently to believe what even the vain and foolish can only believe by fits and starts, but what all men wish to believe and are often found weak enough to believe; that they themselves constitute the supreme standard of things. Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future. Nil admirari becomes the motto of all nihilists; and it ends, in the most complete and exact sense, in nothing.
Vi è dunque un paradosso in tutta questa posizione. L’idea spirituale del male dell’orgoglio, e in special modo dell’orgoglio spirituale, veniva liquidata come un frammento di misticismo di cui la morale moderna non aveva alcun bisogno, essendo questa destinata a farsi puramente sociale e pratica. E, di fatto, proprio di esso vi è particolarissimo bisogno appunto perché la morale è sociale e pratica. Nell’ipotesi che non si debba aver cura di nulla, se non di rendere felici gli altri esseri umani, questa è con tutta certezza la cosa che li renderà infelici. L’argomento pratico contro l’orgoglio, come mera sorgente di disagio e di discordia sociale, è semmai ancora più evidente di per sé di quello, più mistico, che lo condanna come un ergere l’io contro l’anima del mondo. Eppure, benché vediamo questa cosa da ogni lato nella vita moderna, davvero ben poco ne udiamo nella letteratura e nella teoria etica moderne. Anzi, gran parte della letteratura e dell’etica moderne parrebbe fatta apposta per incoraggiare l’orgoglio spirituale. Torme di scribi e di sapienti sono affaccendate a scrivere sull’importanza della coltura di sé e della realizzazione di sé; su come ogni fanciullo debba essere educato a sviluppare la propria personalità (qualunque cosa essa sia); su come ogni uomo debba votarsi al successo, e ogni uomo di successo debba votarsi a coltivare una personalità magnetica e avvincente; su come ogni uomo possa diventare un superuomo (seguendo il Nostro Corso per Corrispondenza) oppure, nel genere più raffinato e artistico di narrativa, su come un superuomo particolarmente superiore possa imparare a guardare dall’alto in basso la mera folla dei comuni superuomini, che formano la popolazione di quel bizzarro mondo. La teoria moderna, nel suo insieme, tende piuttosto a incoraggiare l’egoismo. Ma di ciò non dobbiamo allarmarci. La pratica moderna, essendo esattamente come la pratica antica, continua di gran cuore a scoraggiarlo. L’uomo dalla forte personalità magnetica è ancora l’uomo che coloro i quali meglio lo conoscono desiderano più caldamente prendere a calci per cacciarlo dal circolo. L’uomo giunto a uno stadio davvero acuto di realizzazione di sé non è oggetto più gradevole al circolo di quanto lo sia alla taverna. Persino il più illuminato e scientifico dei circoli riesce a vederlo in trasparenza, il superuomo; e a vedere che è diventato una noia. È nella pratica che la filosofia dell’orgoglio crolla; alla prova degli istinti morali dell’uomo, ovunque due o tre siano riuniti insieme; ed è la semplice esperienza dell’umanità moderna a dare risposta all’eresia moderna.
Vi è, in verità, un’altra esperienza pratica, nota a noi tutti, ancor più pungente e viva della concreta impopolarità del prepotente o del folle tracotante. Tutti sappiamo che esiste una cosa chiamata egoismo assai più profonda dell’egotismo. Di tutte le malattie spirituali, è la più impalpabile e la più intollerabile. Si dice sia imparentata con l’isteria; talvolta sembra quasi imparentata con la possessione diabolica. È quella condizione in cui la vittima compie mille cose diverse da un unico immutabile movente, quello di una vanità divorante; e fa il broncio o sorride, calunnia o loda, cospira e trama oppure siede immobile e non fa nulla, il tutto in un’unica vigilanza insonne sull’effetto sociale di una sola persona. Mi stupisce che nel mondo moderno, che ciancia perpetuamente di psicologia e di sociologia, della tirannide di cui ci minacciano pochi infanti deboli di mente, dell’avvelenamento alcolico e della cura dei nevrotici, di mezzo centinaio di cose che sfiorano il tema e mai colgono il segno — mi stupisce che questi moderni abbiano davvero così poco da dire sulla causa e sulla cura di una condizione morale che avvelena quasi ogni famiglia e ogni cerchia di amici. Non c’è quasi psicologo pratico che abbia da dire in proposito qualcosa di anche solo lontanamente illuminante quanto la letterale esattezza dell’antica massima del sacerdote: che l’orgoglio viene dall’inferno. Poiché c’è qualcosa di terribilmente vivido e spaventosamente immutabile, in questa follia al suo peggio, che rende quella parola breve e antiquata assai più calzante di qualunque altra. E allora, come dicevo, i dotti se ne vanno vagando in discorsi sul bere o sul tabacco, sulla malvagità dei bicchieri di vino o sul carattere incredibile delle osterie. L’opera più malvagia in questo mondo è simboleggiata non da un bicchiere ma da uno specchio; e non si compie nelle osterie, bensì nella più privata di tutte le case private, che è una casa di specchi.
La frase verrebbe probabilmente fraintesa; ma comincerei il mio sermone dicendo alla gente di non godersela. Direi loro di godere danze e teatri e gite in automobile e champagne e ostriche; di godere jazz e cocktail e locali notturni se non sanno godere di nulla di meglio; di godere bigamia e furto con scasso e qualunque delitto del calendario, di preferenza a quest’altra alternativa; ma di non imparare mai a godersela. Gli esseri umani sono felici finché conservano la facoltà ricettiva e la facoltà di reagire con sorpresa e gratitudine a qualcosa di esterno. Finché possiedono ciò, possiedono, come le più grandi menti hanno sempre dichiarato, un che di presente nell’infanzia e che può ancora preservare e rinvigorire l’età adulta. Nell’istante in cui l’io interiore viene consapevolmente sentito come qualcosa di superiore a ciascuno dei doni che gli si possano recare, o a ciascuna delle avventure di cui possa godere, ecco apparire una sorta di schizzinosità che divora se stessa e un disincanto anticipato, che adempie tutti gli emblemi tartarei della sete e della disperazione.
Difficoltà possono facilmente sorgere, s’intende, in un dibattito siffatto per l’accidente di parole usate in sensi diversi; e talvolta in sensi affatto contrari. Per esempio, quando diciamo che qualcuno è «orgoglioso di» qualcosa, come un uomo orgoglioso della moglie o un popolo orgoglioso dei suoi eroi, intendiamo in realtà qualcosa che è proprio l’opposto dell’orgoglio. Poiché ciò implica che l’uomo pensi che qualcosa di esterno a sé gli occorra per dargli grande gloria; e una tale gloria è davvero riconosciuta come un dono. Allo stesso modo, la parola risulterà certamente fuorviante, se dico che l’elemento peggiore e più deprimente, tra gli elementi misti del presente e dell’immediato futuro, mi sembra essere un elemento di impudenza. Poiché c’è una specie di impudenza che tutti troviamo o divertente o corroborante; come nell’impudenza del monello di strada. Ma anche qui le circostanze disarmano la cosa del suo male reale. La qualità comunemente detta «faccia tosta» non è un’affermazione di superiorità, bensì piuttosto un ardito tentativo di bilanciare l’inferiorità. Quando ti avvicini a un nobiluomo assai ricco e potente e gli calchi scherzosamente il cappello sugli occhi (come è tua abitudine), non stai insinuando di essere tu stesso al di sopra di ogni umana follia, bensì piuttosto di esserne capace, e che anch’egli dovrebbe averne un’esperienza più ampia e più ricca. Quando dài una gomitata nel panciotto a un Duca Reale, alla tua maniera scherzosa, non stai prendendo te stesso troppo sul serio, ma soltanto, forse, non prendendo lui così sul serio come di solito si ritiene corretto. Questa sorta di impudenza può prestare il fianco alla critica, così come è certamente soggetta a pericoli. Ma c’è una sorta di dura impudenza intellettuale, che davvero si considera impalpabile a ogni replica o giudizio; e vi è un certo numero, tra le nuove generazioni e i movimenti sociali, di coloro che cadono in questa debolezza fondamentale. È una debolezza; poiché consiste nel radicarsi stabilmente a credere ciò che perfino il vano e lo sciocco possono credere solo a sbalzi e a intermittenza, ma che tutti gli uomini desiderano credere e si trovano spesso abbastanza deboli da credere: che siano essi stessi a costituire il criterio supremo delle cose. L’orgoglio consiste nel fare della propria personalità l’unico metro, anziché fare della verità il metro. Non è orgoglio voler fare bene, o anche solo apparire bene, secondo un criterio reale. È orgoglio pensare che una cosa appaia brutta perché non ha l’aspetto di qualcosa di caratteristico di se stessi. Ora, nel generale offuscarsi dei criteri chiari e astratti, vi è oggi una reale tendenza, in un giovane (e forse persino in una giovane donna), a ripiegare su quel criterio personale, semplicemente per mancanza di un qualsiasi criterio impersonale degno di fiducia. Non essendovi alcun criterio abbastanza saldo perché l’io vi si plasmi per adattarvisi, tutti i criteri possono essere plasmati per adattarsi all’io. Ma l’io in quanto io è cosa assai piccola e qualcosa di molto simile a un accidente. Di qui sorge un nuovo genere di ristrettezza; che alligna specialmente in coloro che si vantano di larghezza. Lo scettico si sente troppo grande per misurare la vita con le cose più grandi; e finisce col misurarla con la più piccola cosa di tutte. Si produce anche una sorta di ossificazione subconscia; che indurisce la mente non solo contro le tradizioni del passato, ma persino contro le sorprese del futuro. Nil admirari diventa il motto di tutti i nichilisti; ed esso finisce, nel senso più completo ed esatto, in nulla.
If I had only one sermon to preach, I certainly could not end it in honour, without testifying to what is in my knowledge the salt and preservative of all these things. This is but one of a thousand things in which I have found the Catholic Church to be right, when the whole world is perpetually tending to be wrong; and without its witness, I believe that this secret, at once a sanity and a subtlety, would be almost entirely forgotten among men. I know that I for one had hardly heard of positive humility until I came within the range of Catholic influence; and even the things that I love most, such as liberty and the island poetry of England, had in this matter lost the way, and were in a fog of self-deception. Indeed there is no better example of the definition of pride than the definition of patriotism. It is the noblest of all natural affections, exactly so long as it consists of saying, “May I be worthy of England.” It is the beginning of one of the blindest forms of Pharisaism when the patriot is content to say, “I am an Englishman.” And I cannot count it an accident that the patriot has generally seen the flag as a flame of vision, beyond and better than himself, in countries of the Catholic tradition, like France and Poland and Ireland; and has hardened into this heresy of admiring merely his own breed and bone and inherited type, and himself as a part of it, in the places most remote from that religion, whether in Berlin or Belfast. In short, if I had only one sermon to preach, it would be one that would profoundly annoy the congregation, by bringing to their attention the permanent challenge of the Church. If I had only one sermon to preach, I should feel specially confident that I should not be asked to preach another.
IF DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA HAD MARRIED MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
Why is it that the world’s most famous love story, after the archetypal story of Adam and Eve, is the story of Antony and Cleopatra? I for one should answer, to begin with, because of the solid truth of the story of Adam and Eve. I have often wondered whether, when the moderns have done playing with that story, burlesquing it, and turning it upside down and tacking on a modern moral like a new tail, or expanding it into an evolutionary fantasia that nobody can make head or tail of, it will ever occur to anybody to see bow sensible it is, exactly as it stands. Even if it is an old fable, the old fable is much truer with the old moral. Christians are not constrained, and least of all Christians of my own confession, to treat Genesis with the heavy verbalism of the Puritan—the Hebraiser who knows no Hebrew. But the curious thing is that the more literally we take it the truer it is; and even if it were materialised and modernised into a story of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the old moral would still be the sound one. A man naked and with nothing of his own is given by a friend the free run of all the fruits and flowers of a very beautiful estate; and only asked to promise that he will not interfere with one particular fruit-tree. If we all talk till we are as old as Methuselah, the moral remains the same for any honourable man. If he breaks his word he is a cad; if he says, “I broke my word because I believe in breaking all limitations and expanding into infinite progress and evolution, he is ten times more of a cad; and has, moreover, become a bore as well as a bounder. But it is this modern suggestion, that Man was right to be bored with Eden and to demand evolution (otherwise mere change), that is very relevant to the question I have asked about Antony and Cleopatra. It is also very relevant to the question I am going to ask about two other famous figures in history: a woman and a man.
For upon this modern theory the Fall really was the Fall; for it was the first action that had only tedium as a motive. Progress began in boredom; and, heaven knows, it sometimes seems likely to end in it. And no wonder; for of all utter falsehoods the most false, I think, is this notion that men can be happy in movement, when nothing but dullness drives them on from behind. Children, and such happy people, can go on from something they really like to something they will like more. But if ever there was a whisper that might truly come from the devil, it is the suggestion that men can despise the beautiful things they have got, and only delight in getting new things because they have not got them. It is obvious that, on that principle, Adam will tire of the tree just as he has tired of the garden. “It is enough that there is always a beyond”; that is, there is always something else to get tired of. All progress based on that mood is truly a Fall; man did fall, does fall, and we can today see him falling. It is the great progressive proposition; that he must seek only for enjoyment because he has lost the power to enjoy.
Now this shadow of failure on all fame and civilisation which the agnostic poet preferred to call “the something that infects the world,” and I shall cause general pain by calling Original Sin, does manifest itself markedly in the sort of historical legends that exist. But I would urge here that it appears in the historical legends that do not exist. I refer especially to that grand historical episode of the heroic honeymoon, otherwise called the marriage of pure minds, which I study here as closely as is possible in a case that does not exist. It is a remarkable fact, when we consider how much happiness love has doubtless given to mankind as a whole, that mankind has never pointed to any great historical example of a hero and a heroine wedded in a way entirely worthy of them; of a great man and a great woman united by a great love that was entirely supreme and satisfying, as in the tradition of the gigantic loves of Eden. Anybody who imagines that I am talking pessimism, about ordinary people in love, will impute to me the very reverse of what I mean. Millions of people have been happy in love and marriage, in the ordinary way of human happiness; but then that precisely consists in a certain commonsense admission of original sin; in humility and pardon and taking things as they come. But there has not been any example on the grand scale, of a perfect marriage—that has remained in human memory like a great monument. All those monuments, though often of the purest marble, hewn from the loftiest mountain, have very clearly across them the crack from the earthquake in the beginning. The noblest knight of the Middle Ages, St. Louis, was less happy in his marriage than in all other relations. Dante did not marry Beatrice; he lost his love in infancy and found her again in Paradise or in a dream. Nelson was a great lover, but we cannot say that his love made him more great, since it made him do in Naples the only mean action of his life. These historic examples have become legends or traditions; but they have become tragic traditions. And the central literary tradition of all is that typically tragic one I have named, in which even perfect love was whimsically imperfect, and certainly suffered by very imperfect people; in which the hero learned no lesson except delay; in which the heroine inspired nothing except defeat; in which romance made him less than a Caesar and has unkindly compared her to a snake; in which the man was weakened by love and the woman by lovers. Men have taken Antony and Cleopatra as the perfect love story, precisely because it is the imperfect love story. It mirrors the thwarting, the unworthiness, the disproportion which they have felt as spoiling so many splendid passions and divine desires; and mirrors them all the more truly because the mirror is cracked. I imagine that poets will never leave off writing about Antony and Cleopatra; and all they write will be in the mood of that great French poet of our own time, who describes the Roman warrior gazing into the unfathomable eyes of the Egyptian queen, and seeing beneath a spinning and sparkling light the eddies of a vast sea, filled with the rout of all his ships.
Se avessi da predicare un solo sermone, non potrei di certo concluderlo nell’onore senza rendere testimonianza a ciò che, per quanto io ne sappia, è il sale e la conserva di tutte queste cose. Questa non è che una fra mille cose nelle quali ho trovato che la Chiesa cattolica ha ragione, mentre il mondo intero tende perpetuamente ad aver torto; e senza la sua testimonianza credo che questo segreto, insieme sanità e sottigliezza, sarebbe quasi del tutto dimenticato tra gli uomini. So che, quanto a me, avevo appena sentito parlare dell’umiltà positiva prima di entrare nel raggio dell’influenza cattolica; e persino le cose che più amo, come la libertà e la poesia insulare dell’Inghilterra, avevano in questa materia smarrito la via, ed erano avvolte in una nebbia di autoinganno. Non v’è invero migliore esempio della definizione dell’orgoglio che la definizione del patriottismo. È il più nobile di tutti gli affetti naturali, esattamente finché consiste nel dire: «Possa io essere degno dell’Inghilterra». È l’inizio di una delle forme più cieche di fariseismo quando il patriota si accontenta di dire: «Io sono un inglese». E non posso ritenere un caso che il patriota abbia generalmente veduto la bandiera come una fiamma di visione, al di là e migliore di sé stesso, nei paesi di tradizione cattolica, come la Francia e la Polonia e l’Irlanda; e si sia invece indurito in questa eresia dell’ammirare soltanto la propria razza e il proprio sangue e il tipo ereditato, e sé medesimo come parte di esso, nei luoghi più remoti da quella religione, sia a Berlino che a Belfast. In breve, se avessi da predicare un solo sermone, sarebbe tale da irritare profondamente l’uditorio, richiamandone l’attenzione sulla sfida permanente della Chiesa. Se avessi da predicare un solo sermone, sarei particolarmente sicuro che non mi si chiederebbe di predicarne un altro.
SE DON GIOVANNI D’AUSTRIA AVESSE SPOSATO MARIA REGINA DI SCOZIA
Perché mai la più celebre storia d’amore del mondo, dopo la storia archetipica di Adamo ed Eva, è la storia di Antonio e Cleopatra? Io, per parte mia, risponderei, tanto per cominciare, a motivo della solida verità della storia di Adamo ed Eva. Mi sono spesso domandato se, quando i moderni avranno finito di trastullarsi con quella storia, di parodiarla, di rovesciarla sottosopra e di appiccicarle una morale moderna come una nuova coda, oppure di dilatarla in una fantasia evoluzionistica di cui nessuno riesce a raccapezzarsi, verrà mai in mente a qualcuno di accorgersi quanto sia sensata, esattamente così com’è. Anche se è un’antica favola, l’antica favola è assai più vera con l’antica morale. I cristiani non sono costretti, e meno di tutti i cristiani della mia confessione, a trattare la Genesi con il pesante verbalismo del puritano — l’ebraizzante che non conosce l’ebraico. Ma la cosa curiosa è che quanto più letteralmente la prendiamo, tanto più è vera; e persino se fosse materializzata e modernizzata in una storia del signore e della signora Jones, l’antica morale sarebbe pur sempre quella giusta. A un uomo nudo e privo di ogni cosa propria un amico concede il libero godimento di tutti i frutti e i fiori di una tenuta bellissima; e gli chiede soltanto di promettere che non toccherà un particolare albero da frutto. Anche se discorressimo finché non fossimo vecchi come Matusalemme, la morale resta la stessa per ogni uomo d’onore. Se manca alla parola data è un mascalzone; se dice: «Ho mancato alla parola perché credo nell’infrangere ogni limitazione e nel dilatarmi in un progresso e un’evoluzione infiniti», è dieci volte più mascalzone; ed è per giunta divenuto un seccatore oltre che un furfante. Ma è proprio questa suggestione moderna, che l’Uomo abbia fatto bene ad annoiarsi dell’Eden e a esigere l’evoluzione (che altro non è se non mutamento), a essere molto pertinente alla domanda che ho posto su Antonio e Cleopatra. Ed è anche molto pertinente alla domanda che sto per porre su altre due celebri figure della storia: una donna e un uomo.
Poiché, secondo questa teoria moderna, la Caduta fu davvero la Caduta; giacché fu la prima azione che ebbe soltanto il tedio per movente. Il progresso cominciò nella noia; e, Dio lo sa, talvolta sembra assai probabile che nella noia debba finire. E non c’è da meravigliarsi; poiché, fra tutte le più assolute falsità, la più falsa, io credo, è questa idea che gli uomini possano essere felici nel movimento, quando null’altro che l’uggia li sospinge da tergo. I fanciulli, e simili creature felici, possono passare da qualcosa che davvero amano a qualcosa che ameranno di più. Ma se mai vi fu un sussurro che potesse davvero provenire dal diavolo, è la suggestione che gli uomini possano disprezzare le cose belle che possiedono, e dilettarsi soltanto nell’ottenere cose nuove perché non le possiedono. È evidente che, secondo tale principio, Adamo si stancherà dell’albero proprio come si è stancato del giardino. «È sufficiente che vi sia sempre un al di là»; vale a dire, che vi sia sempre qualcos’altro di cui stancarsi. Ogni progresso fondato su quell’umore è veramente una Caduta; l’uomo cadde, cade, e oggi possiamo vederlo cadere. È la grande proposizione progressista: che egli debba cercare unicamente il godimento perché ha perduto la facoltà di godere.
Ora, questa ombra di fallimento su ogni fama e su ogni civiltà, che il poeta agnostico preferiva chiamare «quel qualcosa che infetta il mondo», e che io causerò dolore generale chiamando Peccato originale, si manifesta in modo marcato nella sorta di leggende storiche che esistono. Ma vorrei qui insistere sul fatto che essa appare nelle leggende storiche che non esistono. Alludo in particolare a quel grandioso episodio storico della luna di miele eroica, altrimenti detto il matrimonio delle menti pure, che qui studio con la massima attenzione possibile in un caso che non esiste. È un fatto notevole, se consideriamo quanta felicità l’amore ha senza dubbio dato all’umanità nel suo insieme, che l’umanità non abbia mai additato alcun grande esempio storico di un eroe e di un’eroina uniti in nozze in modo interamente degno di loro; di un grand’uomo e di una grande donna uniti da un grande amore che fosse del tutto supremo e appagante, come nella tradizione degli amori giganteschi dell’Eden. Chiunque immagini che io stia facendo del pessimismo, a proposito della gente comune nell’amore, mi attribuirà l’esatto contrario di ciò che intendo. Milioni di persone sono state felici nell’amore e nel matrimonio, secondo l’ordinaria misura della felicità umana; ma allora ciò consiste appunto in una certa ammissione di buon senso del peccato originale; nell’umiltà e nel perdono e nel prendere le cose come vengono. Ma non vi è stato alcun esempio, sulla grande scala, di un matrimonio perfetto — di quelli che restano nella memoria umana come un grande monumento. Tutti quei monumenti, benché spesso del più puro marmo, tratti dalla più eccelsa montagna, recano ben chiara attraverso di sé la crepa del terremoto delle origini. Il più nobile cavaliere del Medioevo, San Luigi, fu meno felice nel suo matrimonio che in tutte le altre relazioni. Dante non sposò Beatrice; perdette il suo amore nell’infanzia e la ritrovò in Paradiso o in un sogno. Nelson fu un grande amante, ma non possiamo dire che il suo amore lo rendesse più grande, poiché gli fece compiere a Napoli l’unica azione meschina della sua vita. Questi esempi storici sono divenuti leggende o tradizioni; ma sono divenuti tradizioni tragiche. E la centrale tradizione letteraria fra tutte è quella tipicamente tragica che ho nominato, in cui persino un amore perfetto fu bizzarramente imperfetto, e certamente patì per opera di persone assai imperfette; in cui l’eroe non imparò lezione alcuna se non l’indugio; in cui l’eroina non ispirò nulla se non la sconfitta; in cui il romanzesco lo rese meno di un Cesare e ha sgarbatamente paragonato lei a un serpente; in cui l’uomo fu indebolito dall’amore e la donna dagli amanti. Gli uomini hanno preso Antonio e Cleopatra come la perfetta storia d’amore, proprio perché è l’imperfetta storia d’amore. Essa rispecchia l’ostacolo, l’indegnità, la sproporzione che essi hanno sentito come rovina di tante splendide passioni e divini desideri; e li rispecchia tanto più fedelmente in quanto lo specchio è incrinato. Immagino che i poeti non smetteranno mai di scrivere di Antonio e Cleopatra; e tutto ciò che scriveranno sarà nell’umore di quel grande poeta francese del nostro tempo, che descrive il guerriero romano nell’atto di fissare gli occhi insondabili della regina egizia, e di scorgere, sotto una luce roteante e sfavillante, i gorghi di un vasto mare, gremito dalla rotta di tutte le sue navi.
I have here dared to call up out of the dust another warrior, whose destiny turned also with the topsails and high poops of the galleys; and another woman, whose legend also has been sometimes twisted into the legend of a snake. There was never any doubt about the beautiful colours or graceful curves of the snake; but, in fact, the woman was not a snake, but very much of a woman; even by the account of those who call her a wicked woman. And the man was not only a warrior, but a conqueror; and his great ships sweep through history not merely to defeat, but to a high deliverance, in which he did not lose the empire, but saved the world. Whatever else we may think of the woman, none can doubt where her heart would have been in that battle, or what sort of song of praise she would have sent up after that victory. There was much about her that was militant, though her life might well have sickened her of militancy; there was much about him that was sensitive and sympathetic with that wider world of culture for which her soul sickened till she died. They were made for each other; they were in fact the heroic lovers, or perfect human pair, for whom we have looked elsewhere in history in vain. There was only one small defect in their purple and impassioned love story; and that is that they never met.
In truth, this dream began to drift through my mind when I first read a parenthetical remark by Andrew Lang, in a historical study about Philip of Spain. Referring to the King’s half-brother, the famous Don John of Austria, Lang remarked casually: “He intended to carry off Mary Queen of Scots,” and added caustically: “He was incapable of fear.” Of course nobody is incapable of fear. He was certainly, in the common sense, incapable of obeying fear: but, if I understand the type, he was not incapable of enjoying fear as an element in a mystery like that of love. It is exactly because love has lost that slight touch of fear, that it has become in our time so flat and flippant and vulgar; when it has not become laboriously biological, not to say bestial. And Mary was dangerous as well as in danger; that heart-shaped face looking out of the ruff in so many pictures was like a magnet, a talisman, a terrible jewel. There was, even then, in the idea of eloping with the tragic yet attractive Franco-Scottish princess, all the ancient savour of the romances about delivering a lady from dragons, or even disenchanting her out of the shape of a dragon. But though the idea was romantic, it was also in a sense what is now called psychological; for it exactly answered the personal needs of two very extraordinary personalities.
If ever there was a man who ought to have rounded off his victorious career by capturing something more human and spiritual and satisfying than wreaths of laurel or flags of defeated foes, it was Don John of Austria. Because his actual historical life rises on a wave of conquest in relation to these things, and then sinks again into something less epical and simple, his life has something of the appearance of an anti-climax; and reads like a mere stale maxim that all victories are vanities. He tried to crown his chief exploit by founding a kingdom of his own, and was prevented by the jealousy of his brother; he then went, somewhat wearily, I imagine, as the representative of the same brother to the Flemish fields laid waste by the wars of the Dutch and the Duke of Alva. He set out to be more merciful and magnanimous than the Duke of Alva; but he died in a net or tangle of policies; of which the only touch of poetry was a suggestion of poison.
But in that broad and golden dawn of the Renaissance, full of classical legends, carrying off Mary Stuart would have been like carrying off Helen of Troy. In that red sunset of the old chivalric romance (for the sunrise and the sunset were both in that bewildering sky) it would have seemed a magnificent materialisation of one of those strange and stately public love affairs, or knightly services, which preserved something of the Courts of Love and the pageant of the Troubadours; as when Rudel publicly pledged himself to an unknown lady in a castle in the east, almost as distant as a castle east of the sun; or the sword of Bayard sent across the mountains its remote salute to Lucretia. That one of these great loves of the great should actually be achieved in the grand style, that, I fancy, would have been a wildly popular episode in that epoch. And to the career of Don John it would have given a climax and a clue of meaning which its merely military successes could not give; and handed his name down in history and (what is much more important) in legend and literature, as a happier Antony married to a nobler Cleopatra. And when he looked into her eyes he would not have seen only bright chaos and the catastrophe of Actium, the ruin of his ships and his hopes of an imperial throne; but rather the flying curve and crescent of the Christian ships, sweeping to the rescue of the Christian captives, and blazed upon their golden sails the sunburst of Lepanto.
The converse is also true. If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she. The tragedy of her life was not that she was abnormal, but that she was normal. It was the crowd all round her that was abnormal. There is almost a sort of antic allegory, in that sense, in such accidents as the fact that Rizzio had a hump and Bothwell some sort of a squint. If her story seems now to be steeped in morbidity, it was because the mob was morbid. Unfortunately for this ill-fated queen, she was not morbid. It is the other characters, each in his own way, which pass before us in misshapen outlines like the dwarfs and lunatics in some tropic tragedy of Ford or Webster, dancing round a deserted queen. And, by a final touch, all these ungainly figures seem more tolerable than the one that is externally elegant, the hollow doll, Darnley; just as a handsome waxwork can seem more uncanny than an ugly man. In that sense she had seen handsome men and ugly men and strong men and clever men; but they were all half-men; like the hideous cripples imagined by Flaubert, living in their half-houses with their half-wives and half-children. She never met a complete man; and Don John was very complete. In that sense she had been given many things; the crown of Scotland, the prospect of the crown of France; the prospect of the crown of England. She had been given everything except fresh air and the sunlight treatment; and all that is typified by the great ships with their golden castles and their leaping flags, that go forth to meet the winds of the world.
Ho osato qui evocare dalla polvere un altro guerriero, il cui destino si decise anch’esso tra le vele di gabbia e gli alti casseri delle galere; e un’altra donna, la cui leggenda è stata anch’essa talvolta contorta fino a confondersi con la leggenda di un serpente. Non vi fu mai dubbio alcuno sui bei colori o sulle curve aggraziate del serpente; ma, in verità, la donna non era un serpente, bensì quanto mai una donna; anche a detta di coloro che la dicono donna malvagia. E l’uomo non fu soltanto un guerriero, ma un conquistatore; e le sue grandi navi solcano la storia non semplicemente verso una disfatta, ma verso un’alta liberazione, nella quale egli non perdette l’impero, ma salvò il mondo. Qualunque cosa possiamo pensare della donna, nessuno può dubitare di dove sarebbe stato il suo cuore in quella battaglia, né di quale sorta di canto di lode avrebbe innalzato dopo quella vittoria. Vi era in lei molto di battagliero, per quanto la sua vita ben avrebbe potuto darle la nausea di ogni battaglia; e vi era in lui molto di sensibile e partecipe di quel più ampio mondo della cultura per il quale la sua anima si struggì fino alla morte. Erano fatti l’uno per l’altra; erano di fatto gli eroici amanti, la coppia umana perfetta, che altrove abbiamo cercato invano nella storia. Vi era un solo, piccolo difetto nella loro purpurea e appassionata storia d’amore; ed è che non s’incontrarono mai.
In verità, questo sogno cominciò ad aleggiarmi per la mente la prima volta che lessi un’osservazione fatta per inciso da Andrew Lang, in uno studio storico su Filippo di Spagna. Riferendosi al fratellastro del re, il celebre Don Giovanni d’Austria, Lang osservava con noncuranza: «Intendeva rapire Maria regina di Scozia», e aggiungeva con causticità: «Era incapace di paura». Naturalmente nessuno è incapace di paura. Egli era certamente, nel senso comune, incapace di obbedire alla paura: ma, se ho inteso bene il tipo d’uomo, non era incapace di godere della paura come elemento di un mistero, quale è quello dell’amore. È proprio perché l’amore ha smarrito quel lieve tocco di paura che, ai nostri giorni, è divenuto tanto piatto, frivolo e volgare; quando non è divenuto laboriosamente biologico, per non dire bestiale. E Maria era pericolosa non meno che in pericolo; quel volto a forma di cuore che si affaccia dalla gorgiera in tanti ritratti era come una calamita, un talismano, un terribile gioiello. Vi era, già allora, nell’idea di fuggire con la tragica eppure affascinante principessa franco-scozzese, tutto l’antico sapore dei romanzi sul liberare una dama dai draghi, o addirittura sul disincantarla dalla forma stessa di un drago. Ma per quanto l’idea fosse romantica, era anche, in un certo senso, ciò che oggi si dice psicologica; poiché rispondeva esattamente ai bisogni personali di due personalità straordinarissime.
Se mai vi fu un uomo che avrebbe dovuto coronare la sua vittoriosa carriera conquistando qualcosa di più umano, di più spirituale e appagante che non serti d’alloro o bandiere di nemici sconfitti, quello era Don Giovanni d’Austria. Poiché la sua reale vita storica si leva su un’onda di conquista rispetto a tali cose, per poi ricadere in qualcosa di meno epico e semplice, la sua vita ha qualcosa dell’aspetto di un anticlimax; e si legge come una mera e trita massima secondo cui tutte le vittorie sono vanità. Egli tentò di coronare la sua principale impresa fondando un regno tutto suo, e ne fu impedito dalla gelosia del fratello; poi se ne andò, alquanto stancamente, immagino, come rappresentante di quello stesso fratello nelle terre fiamminghe devastate dalle guerre degli Olandesi e del duca d’Alba. Si propose di essere più misericordioso e magnanimo del duca d’Alba; ma morì in una rete, in un groviglio di intrighi politici; di cui l’unico tocco di poesia fu il sospetto di un veleno.
Ma in quell’ampia e dorata alba del Rinascimento, colma di leggende classiche, rapire Maria Stuarda sarebbe stato come rapire Elena di Troia. In quel rosso tramonto dell’antico romanzo cavalleresco (poiché l’alba e il tramonto stavano entrambi in quel cielo sconcertante) sarebbe parsa una magnifica materializzazione di uno di quegli strani e solenni amori pubblici, o servigi cavallereschi, che serbavano qualcosa delle Corti d’Amore e del corteo dei Trovatori; come quando Rudel si votò pubblicamente a una dama sconosciuta in un castello d’oriente, quasi altrettanto lontano quanto un castello a oriente del sole; o come quando la spada di Baiardo inviava al di là dei monti il suo remoto saluto a Lucrezia. Che uno di questi grandi amori dei grandi fosse davvero portato a compimento nel grande stile: ecco, immagino, ciò che sarebbe stato un episodio follemente popolare in quell’epoca. E alla carriera di Don Giovanni avrebbe conferito un culmine e una chiave di senso che i suoi successi meramente militari non potevano dare; e ne avrebbe tramandato il nome nella storia e (ciò che più conta) nella leggenda e nella letteratura, come un più felice Antonio sposato a una più nobile Cleopatra. E quando le avesse guardato negli occhi non vi avrebbe scorto soltanto il fulgido caos e la catastrofe di Azio, la rovina delle sue navi e delle sue speranze di un trono imperiale; ma piuttosto la curva vertiginosa e la falce delle navi cristiane, che accorrevano in soccorso dei prigionieri cristiani, e che avevano visto avvampare sulle loro vele d’oro il sole irrompente di Lepanto.
L’inverso è del pari vero. Se mai vi fu una donna manifestamente pensata, destinata, creata e per così dire invocante a gran voce di essere rapita da Don Giovanni d’Austria, o da qualche uomo simile a lui, quella era Maria regina di Scozia. Se mai vi fu una donna che appassì per non aver mai incontrato uomo alcuno che le fosse in qualche modo pari, quella fu lei. La tragedia della sua vita non fu che ella fosse anormale, ma che fosse normale. Era la folla tutt’attorno a lei a essere anormale. Vi è quasi una sorta di grottesca allegoria, in tal senso, in accidenti come il fatto che Rizzio avesse una gobba e Bothwell una specie di strabismo. Se la sua storia sembra oggi intrisa di morbosità, ciò fu perché era la turba a essere morbosa. Sfortunatamente per questa regina sventurata, non era lei a essere morbosa. Sono gli altri personaggi, ciascuno a suo modo, a sfilarci dinanzi in contorni deformi, come i nani e i pazzi di qualche torrida tragedia di Ford o di Webster, danzanti intorno a una regina abbandonata. E, con un tocco finale, tutte queste figure sgraziate appaiono più sopportabili di quell’una che è esteriormente elegante, la vuota marionetta, Darnley; proprio come una bella figura di cera può apparire più inquietante di un uomo brutto. In tal senso ella aveva conosciuto uomini belli e uomini brutti, uomini forti e uomini intelligenti; ma erano tutti mezz’uomini; come gli orrendi storpi immaginati da Flaubert, che vivono nelle loro mezze-case con le loro mezze-mogli e i loro mezzi-figli. Non incontrò mai un uomo completo; e Don Giovanni era completissimo. In tal senso le erano state date molte cose; la corona di Scozia, la prospettiva della corona di Francia; la prospettiva della corona d’Inghilterra. Le era stato dato tutto, tranne l’aria aperta e la cura del sole; e tutto ciò che è simboleggiato dalle grandi navi con i loro castelli dorati e le loro bandiere guizzanti, che salpano incontro ai venti del mondo.
We know why Mary Stuart was killed. She was not killed for having killed her husband, even if she had killed her husband; and recent study of the Casket Letters suggests that her enemies are more clearly convicted of forgery than she was ever convicted of murder. She was not killed for trying to kill Elizabeth, even if the whole story of trying to kill Elizabeth was not a fiction employed by those who were trying to kill Mary. She was not killed for being beautiful; that is one of the many popular slanders on poor Elizabeth. She was killed for being in good health. Perhaps she was the only person who was ever condemned and executed merely for being in good health. The legend which represented Elizabeth as a lioness and Mary as a sort of sickly snake is largely abandoned; anyhow, it is the very reverse of the fact. Mary was very vigorous; a strong rider, and as a dancer almost ready to outrun the Modern Girl. Curiously enough, her contemporary portraits do not convey much of her charm, but do convey a great deal of her vigour. But, as anyone may have noticed in the animal spirits of some of the finest actresses, vigour has sometimes a great deal to do with charm. Now it was essential to the policy of Cecil, and the oligarchs rich with the loot of the old religion, that Mary should die for Elizabeth, and Mary, despite her misfortunes, did not show the smallest disposition to die. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still dying rather than still living. And when the Catholic heir inherited, it might go ill with the Protestant lords. They therefore applied to Mary, at Fotheringay, one of the sharpest possible remedies for good health, which has seldom been known to fail.
Her energy, which had thus brought her to her death, had also brought her through her life; and may be the key to many of the riddles of her life. It may be that her repeated ill-luck in marriage embittered her more than it might a woman less normal and elemental; and that the very levities, which led to her being painted as a harlot or a vampire, sprang from her primary fitness to be a mother and a wife. It may be (for all I know) that a fairly healthy person, in such a horrible experience, might have wasted her natural instincts on some violent adventurer like Bothwell; those things are always possible; but I confess I could never see that in this case they were necessary. I have often fancied that the alliance may have been more politic, and even cynical, than appeared to that fine romantic novelist, the forger of the Casket Letters. Or it might have been surrender to a sort of blackmail; it might have been many things. Anyhow, being surrounded by brutes, she chose the best brute; though he is always represented as the worst. He was the only one of them who was a man as well as a brute; and a Scotsman as well as a man. He at least never betrayed her to Elizabeth; and all the others did nothing else. He kept the borders of her kingdom against the English like a good subject and a normal soldier; and she might very well have thrown herself under his protection for that alone. But whether or no she sought satisfaction in such a marriage, I am sure that she never found satisfaction in it; I am sure she found only a new phase of the long degradation of living with her inferiors.
There was always in her heart a hunger for civilisation. It is an appetite not easily appreciated now, when people are so over-civilised that they can only have a hunger for barbarism. But she loved culture as the Italian artists of the previous century had loved it; as something not only beautiful but bright and shining and new; like Leonardo’s first sketches of flying-machines or the full revelations of perspective and light. She was the Renaissance chained up like a prisoner; just as Don John was the Renaissance roaming the world like a pirate. This was, of course, the perfectly simple explanation of her frequent and friendly toleration of a hunchback like Rizzio and a young lunatic like Chastelard. They were Italy and France; they were music and letters; they were singing-birds from the South who had happened to perch on her window-sill. If there are still any historians who suppose that they were anything more to her than that, especially in the case of the Italian secretary, I can only say that such learned old gentlemen must be pretty much on the moral and mental level of Darnley and his company of cut-throats. Even if she was a wicked woman, there is no sense in supposing that she was not an intelligent woman, or that she never wished to turn from her laborious and life-long wickedness for a little intelligent conversation. The apology for my own (somewhat belated) experiment in matchmaking is that she might have been very different, when married to a man who was quite as brave as Bothwell and quite as intelligent as Rizzio, and, in a more practical and useful fashion, at least as romantic as Chastelard.
But we must not be romantic; that is, we must not concern ourselves with the real feelings of real and recognisable human beings. It is not allowed. We must now sternly turn our attention to scientific history; that is, to certain abstractions which have been labelled The Elizabethan Settlement, the Union, the Reformation, and the Modern World. I will leave the Romantics, those unpresentable Bohemians (with whom, of course, I would not be seen for worlds), to decide at what date and crisis they would like Don John finally to fulfil his design; whether his shining ship is to appear in the wide waters of the Forth as the mad mob in Edinburgh is waving scurrilous scrolls and banners before the window of the Queen; or, on the contrary, a dark boat with a solitary figure is to slide across the glassy stillness of Loch Leven; or a courier hot with haste in advance of a new army hurl a new challenge into the bickering parleys of Carberry, or a herald emblazoned with God knows what eagles and castles and lions (and presumably a bar sinister) blow a trumpet before the barred portals of Fotheringay. I leave that to them; they know all about it. I am an earnest and plodding student of the dry scientific details of history; and we really must consider the possible effect on such details as England, Scotland, Spain, Europe, and the world. We must suppose, for the sake of argument, that Don John was at least sufficiently strong to assert Mary’s claim to sovereignty in Scotland to begin with; and, despite the unpleasant moralising of the mob in Edinburgh, I think such a restoration would have been generally successful in Scotland. Professor Phillimore used to say that the tragedy of Scotland was that she had the Reformation without the Renaissance. And I certainly think that, while Mary and the southern prince were discussing Plato and Pico della Mirandola, John Knox would have found himself a little out of his depth. But on the assumption of popular rulers and a strong Spanish backing, which is the essence of this fantasy, I should say that a people like the Scots would have gobbled up the strong meat of the Revival of Learning quicker than anybody else. But in any case, there is another point to be considered. If the Scots did not figure prominently in the Renaissance, they had, in their own way, figured most brilliantly in the Middle Ages. Glasgow was one of the oldest universities; Bruce was counted the fourth knight in Christendom; and Scotland, not England, continued the tradition of Chaucer. The chivalrous side of the regime would surely have awakened noble memories, even in that ignoble squabble. I must here unfortunately omit a very fine chapter from the unpublished Romance, in which the lovers ride down to Melrose (if necessary by moonlight) to the reputed resting-place of the Heart of Bruce; and recall (in ringing phrases) how Spanish and Scottish spears had once charged side by side upon the Saracen, and hurled far ahead, like a bolt above the battle, the heart of a Scottish King. This fine piece of prose must not delay us, however, from facing the next fact; which is that Mary, once safe, would survive as the Queen of England as well as Scotland. It is enough to say that medieval memories might have awakened in the North; and the Scots might even have remembered the meaning of Holyrood.
Sappiamo perché Maria Stuarda fu messa a morte. Non fu messa a morte per aver ucciso il marito, ammesso pure che il marito lo avesse ucciso; e i recenti studi sulle Lettere dello Scrigno lasciano intendere che i suoi nemici siano più chiaramente convinti di falso di quanto lei sia mai stata convinta d’omicidio. Non fu messa a morte per aver tentato di uccidere Elisabetta, ammesso pure che l’intera storia del tentato assassinio di Elisabetta non fosse una finzione imbastita da coloro che tentavano di uccidere Maria. Non fu messa a morte per essere bella: è questa una delle tante calunnie popolari a danno della povera Elisabetta. Fu messa a morte per godere di buona salute. Fu forse l’unica persona mai condannata e giustiziata unicamente per il fatto di stare in buona salute. La leggenda che dipingeva Elisabetta come una leonessa e Maria come una sorta di serpe malaticcia è in gran parte abbandonata; e comunque è l’esatto rovescio della verità. Maria era assai vigorosa: una robusta cavallerizza, e come ballerina quasi pronta a soverchiare la Ragazza Moderna. Curiosamente, i ritratti a lei contemporanei non rendono granché del suo fascino, ma rendono moltissimo del suo vigore. Eppure, come chiunque avrà notato nella vivacità animale di certe fra le più belle attrici, il vigore ha talora molto a che fare con il fascino. Ora, era essenziale alla politica di Cecil, e degli oligarchi arricchiti col bottino dell’antica religione, che Maria morisse per Elisabetta; e Maria, a dispetto delle sue sventure, non mostrava la minima inclinazione a morire. Elisabetta, per contro, stava ancora morendo piuttosto che ancora vivendo. E quando l’erede cattolica avesse ereditato, poteva andar male per i signori protestanti. Perciò applicarono a Maria, a Fotheringay, uno dei più drastici rimedi possibili contro la buona salute, del quale di rado si è visto fallire l’effetto.
La sua energia, che l’aveva così condotta alla morte, l’aveva del pari sorretta attraverso la vita; e può essere la chiave di molti enigmi della sua esistenza. Può darsi che la sua ripetuta sfortuna in matrimonio l’abbia amareggiata più di quanto avrebbe fatto con una donna meno normale ed elementare; e che le stesse leggerezze, per cui fu dipinta come una meretrice o un vampiro, sgorgassero dalla sua fondamentale attitudine ad essere madre e moglie. Può darsi (per quanto ne so) che una persona ragionevolmente sana, in un’esperienza tanto orribile, avrebbe sprecato i propri istinti naturali con qualche violento avventuriero come Bothwell; simili cose sono sempre possibili; ma confesso che non ho mai potuto vedere come, in questo caso, fossero necessarie. Ho spesso immaginato che quell’alleanza possa essere stata più politica, e persino più cinica, di quanto apparve a quel fine e romantico romanziere, il falsario delle Lettere dello Scrigno. Oppure può essere stata una resa a una sorta di ricatto; può essere stata molte cose. Comunque sia, circondata da bruti, scelse il migliore fra i bruti; benché egli sia sempre rappresentato come il peggiore. Fu il solo tra loro che fosse un uomo oltre che un bruto; e uno Scozzese oltre che un uomo. Egli, almeno, non la tradì mai consegnandola a Elisabetta; e tutti gli altri non fecero altro. Difese i confini del suo regno contro gli Inglesi come un buon suddito e un normale soldato; e ben avrebbe potuto lei gettarsi sotto la sua protezione per quello soltanto. Ma sia che ella cercasse o no soddisfazione in un simile matrimonio, sono certo che non ve la trovò mai; sono certo che vi trovò soltanto una nuova fase della lunga degradazione del vivere fra i suoi inferiori.
Vi fu sempre nel suo cuore una fame di civiltà. È un appetito non facile ad apprezzarsi oggi, quando la gente è tanto ipercivilizzata da poter provare soltanto una fame di barbarie. Ma essa amava la cultura come l’avevano amata gli artisti italiani del secolo precedente; come qualcosa non solo di bello, ma di luminoso, splendente e nuovo; come i primi schizzi di macchine volanti di Leonardo o le piene rivelazioni della prospettiva e della luce. Ella era il Rinascimento incatenato come un prigioniero; proprio come Don John era il Rinascimento che vagava per il mondo come un pirata. Questa era, naturalmente, la spiegazione perfettamente semplice della sua frequente e benevola tolleranza verso un gobbo come Rizzio e un giovane forsennato come Chastelard. Essi erano l’Italia e la Francia; erano la musica e le lettere; erano uccelli canori venuti dal Sud che per caso si erano posati sul davanzale della sua finestra. Se vi sono ancora storici che suppongono ch’essi fossero per lei qualcosa di più di questo, specie nel caso del segretario italiano, non posso che dire che tali dotti vecchi signori devono trovarsi press’a poco sullo stesso livello morale e mentale di Darnley e della sua compagnia di tagliagole. Anche se fu una donna malvagia, non ha senso supporre che non fosse una donna intelligente, o che non desiderasse mai distogliersi dalla sua laboriosa e perpetua malvagità per un po’ di conversazione intelligente. La giustificazione del mio (alquanto tardivo) esperimento di sensale è che ella avrebbe potuto essere assai diversa, sposata a un uomo tanto valoroso quanto Bothwell e tanto intelligente quanto Rizzio, e, in una foggia più pratica e utile, almeno tanto romantico quanto Chastelard.
Ma non dobbiamo essere romantici; vale a dire, non dobbiamo occuparci dei sentimenti reali di esseri umani reali e riconoscibili. Non è permesso. Dobbiamo ora rivolgere severamente la nostra attenzione alla storia scientifica; ossia a certe astrazioni che sono state etichettate come l’Assetto Elisabettiano, l’Unione, la Riforma e il Mondo Moderno. Lascerò ai Romantici, quei Bohémien impresentabili (con i quali, s’intende, non mi lascerei vedere per nulla al mondo), il compito di decidere a quale data e crisi vorrebbero che Don John compisse finalmente il suo disegno; se la sua nave splendente debba apparire nelle ampie acque del Forth mentre la folla forsennata di Edimburgo sventola scurrili cartelli e stendardi davanti alla finestra della Regina; oppure, al contrario, se una scura barca con una figura solitaria debba scivolare attraverso la vitrea quiete del Loch Leven; o se un corriere trafelato per la fretta, in anticipo su un nuovo esercito, scagli una nuova sfida negli acri parlamentari di Carberry, o se un araldo blasonato Dio sa di quali aquile, castelli e leoni (e presumibilmente d’una banda sinistra) suoni la tromba dinanzi ai portali sbarrati di Fotheringay. Lascio tutto ciò a loro; essi ne sanno ogni cosa. Io sono uno studente diligente e ostinato degli aridi particolari scientifici della storia; e dobbiamo davvero considerare il possibile effetto su particolari come l’Inghilterra, la Scozia, la Spagna, l’Europa e il mondo. Dobbiamo supporre, per amor di discussione, che Don John fosse almeno abbastanza forte da far valere, tanto per cominciare, la pretesa di Maria alla sovranità sulla Scozia; e, a dispetto degli sgradevoli moralismi della folla di Edimburgo, credo che una simile restaurazione sarebbe stata in genere coronata da successo in Scozia. Il professor Phillimore era solito dire che la tragedia della Scozia fu di aver avuto la Riforma senza il Rinascimento. E per certo penso che, mentre Maria e il principe meridionale discutevano di Platone e di Pico della Mirandola, John Knox si sarebbe trovato un poco fuori dal suo elemento. Ma nell’ipotesi di sovrani amati dal popolo e di un forte appoggio spagnolo, che è l’essenza di questa fantasia, direi che un popolo come gli Scozzesi avrebbe divorato la forte carne del Rinascimento delle Lettere più in fretta di chiunque altro. Ma in ogni caso, v’è un altro punto da considerare. Se gli Scozzesi non figurarono in primo piano nel Rinascimento, essi avevano, a modo loro, figurato assai brillantemente nel Medioevo. Glasgow era una delle più antiche università; Bruce era annoverato come il quarto cavaliere della Cristianità; e fu la Scozia, non l’Inghilterra, a continuare la tradizione di Chaucer. Il lato cavalleresco di quel regime avrebbe di certo ridestato nobili memorie, perfino in quell’ignobile zuffa. Devo qui purtroppo omettere un bellissimo capitolo del Romanzo inedito, in cui gli amanti cavalcano fino a Melrose (se occorre, al chiaro di luna) al reputato luogo di riposo del Cuore di Bruce; e rievocano (in frasi squillanti) come lance spagnole e scozzesi avessero un tempo caricato fianco a fianco contro il Saraceno, e scagliato lontano innanzi a sé, come un dardo al di sopra della battaglia, il cuore di un Re scozzese. Questo bel brano di prosa non deve però trattenerci dall’affrontare il fatto successivo; ossia che Maria, una volta al sicuro, sarebbe sopravvissuta come Regina d’Inghilterra oltre che di Scozia. Basti dire che nel Nord avrebbero potuto ridestarsi memorie medievali; e gli Scozzesi avrebbero perfino potuto ricordare il significato di Holyrood.
Don John died trying to keep his temper with Dutch Calvinists, about ten years before the affair of the Armada; and, much as I admire him, I am glad he did. I do not want my individual dream or romance, about the rescue and elopement of Mary Stuart, mixed up with that famous international collision, in which as an Englishman I am bound to sympathise with England and as an Anti-Imperialist with the smaller nation. But, it may be said, how can an Englishman in any case reconcile himself to a romance that would involve the Elizabethan policy being overthrown by a Spanish prince, the throne occupied by a Scottish queen; or some part at least of the Armada’s purposes achieved? To which I answer that such a question recoils ruinously on those who ask it. Let them merely compare what might have happened with what did happen. Was Mary a Scot? We endured one in her son. Was Don John a foreigner? We submitted to one when we expelled the grandson of her son. Mary was as English as James the First. Don John was as English as George the First. The fact is that, whatever else our policy of insular religion (or whatever we call it) may have done, it certainly did not save us from alien immigration, or even from alien invasion. Some may say we could not accept a Spaniard, when we had been recently fighting the Spaniards. But, when we did accept a Dutch prince, we had been recently fighting the Dutch. Blake as well as Drake might complain that his victories had been reversed; and that we had, after all, allowed the broom of Van Tromp to sweep not only the English seas, but the English land. A whole generation before the first George came from Hanover, William of Orange had marched across England with an invading army from Holland. If Don John had really brought an Armada with him (and Armadas are often awkward during elopements) he could hardly have inflicted a heavier humiliation on us than that. But, of course, the truth is that I am sensitive on the point of patriotism; much more sensitive than anybody was in those days. Extreme nationalism is a relatively new religion; and what these people were thinking of was the old sort of religion. It really made a great difference to them that Dutch William was a Calvinist while Don John was a Catholic; and that whatever George the First was (and he was nearly nothing) he was not a Papist. That brings me to a much more vital phase of my vision of what never happened. But those who expect me to break forth into thunders of theological anathema, will here be rather abruptly disappointed. I have no intention, I have no need, to argue here about Luther and Leo and the rights and wrongs of the revolt of new sects in the North. I need not do so, for the simple reason that I do not believe, in the case here imagined, that we should have been primarily concerned about the North. I believe we should have realised instead the enormously important position in the South; and even more so in the East. All eyes would have been turned to a far more central battle of civilisation; and the hero of that battle was Don John of Austria.
It has been remarked, and not untruly, that the Papacy seemed curiously negligent of the northern danger from Protestantism. It was; but chiefly because it was not at all negligent of the eastern danger from Islam. Throughout all that period Pope after Pope issued appeal after appeal to the princes of Europe to combine in defence of all Christendom against the Asiatic attack. They had hardly any response; and only a scratch fleet of their own galleys with some Venetian, Genoese, and others, could be sent to stop the Turk from sweeping the whole Mediterranean. This is the huge historic fact which the northern doctrinal quarrels have concealed; and that is why I am not concerned here with the northern doctrinal quarrels. That age was not the age of the Reformation. It was the age of the last great Asiatic invasion, which very nearly destroyed Europe. About the time the Reformation was beginning, the Turks, in the very middle of Europe, destroyed at a blow the ancient kingdom of Bohemia. About the time the Reformation had finished its work, the hordes out of Asia were besieging Vienna. They were foiled by the stroke of Sobieski the Pole, as a hundred years before by the stroke of Don John of Austria. But they came as near as that to submerging the cities of Europe. It must also be remembered that this last Moslem thrust was really a savage and incalculable thing, compared with the first thrust of Saladin and the Saracens. The high Arab culture of the Crusades had long perished; and the invaders were Tartars and Turks and a rabble from really barbarous lands. It was not the Moors but the Huns. It was not Saladin against Richard or Averroes against Aquinas; it was something much more like the worst and wildest shocker about the Yellow Peril.
I have a great respect for the real virtues and the sane if sleeping virility of Islam. I like that element in it that is at once democratic and dignified; I sympathise with many elements in it which most Europeans (and all Americans) would call lazy and unprogressive. But when all allowance has been made for these moral merits, of the simpler sort, I defy anybody with a sense of cultural comparison to tolerate the image of Europe of the Renaissance given up to Bashi-Bazouks and the wild Mongol mobs of the decline. But it is almost as bad if we consider only the vetoes of primitive Islam; and most of its virtues were vetoes. When all is said, to the eyes of Mediterranean men especially, there passed across their shining sea merely the shadow of a great Destroyer. What they heard was the voice of Azrael rather than Allah. Theirs was the vision that would have been the background of my dream; and lifted all its nobler figures, English, Spanish, or Scottish, into the altitudes of defiance and martyrdom. The dry wind that drove before it a dust of broken idols was threatening the poised statues of Angelo and Donatello, where they shine on the high places around the central sea; and the sand of the high deserts descended, like moving mountains of dust and thirst and death, on the deep culture of the sacred vines; and the songs and the deep laughter of the vineyards. And above all, those clouds that were closing round them were like the curtains of the harem, from whose corners look out the stony faces of the eunuchs; there spread like a vast shadow over shining courts and closing spaces the silence of the East, and all its dumb compromise with the coarseness of man. These things, above all, were closing in upon that high and thwarted romance of the perfect Knight and Lady, which men of the Christian blood can never attain and never abandon; but which these two alone, perhaps, might have attained and made one flesh.
Don John morì mentre cercava di non perdere la pazienza con i calvinisti olandesi, una decina d’anni prima della vicenda dell’Armada; e, per quanto io lo ammiri, sono lieto che sia andata così. Non voglio che il mio sogno personale, il mio romanzo cavalleresco sul salvataggio e sulla fuga d’amore di Maria Stuarda, si confonda con quel celebre urto internazionale, nel quale, come inglese, sono tenuto a parteggiare per l’Inghilterra, e come anti-imperialista per la nazione più piccola. Ma si potrà obiettare: come può un inglese, in ogni caso, riconciliarsi con un romanzo cavalleresco che comporterebbe il rovesciamento della politica elisabettiana da parte di un principe spagnolo, il trono occupato da una regina scozzese, o almeno una parte dei disegni dell’Armada portata a compimento? Al che rispondo che una simile domanda si ritorce rovinosamente contro chi la pone. Bastino a costoro paragonare ciò che sarebbe potuto accadere con ciò che effettivamente accadde. Era Maria una scozzese? Ne sopportammo uno in suo figlio. Era Don John uno straniero? Ci sottomettemmo a uno straniero quando espellemmo il nipote di suo figlio. Maria era inglese quanto Giacomo I. Don John era inglese quanto Giorgio I. Il fatto è che, qualunque altra cosa possa aver fatto la nostra politica di religione insulare (o comunque vogliamo chiamarla), di certo non ci risparmiò l’immigrazione straniera, e neppure l’invasione straniera. Alcuni diranno che non potevamo accettare uno spagnolo, avendo di recente combattuto gli spagnoli. Ma, quando accettammo un principe olandese, avevamo di recente combattuto gli olandesi. Blake, così come Drake, avrebbe potuto lamentarsi che le sue vittorie erano state capovolte; e che avevamo, in fin dei conti, permesso alla scopa di Van Tromp di spazzare non soltanto i mari inglesi, ma la terra inglese. Un’intera generazione prima che il primo Giorgio venisse da Hannover, Guglielmo d’Orange aveva marciato attraverso l’Inghilterra con un esercito invasore giunto dall’Olanda. Se Don John avesse davvero portato con sé un’Armada (e le Armadas sono spesso ingombranti durante una fuga d’amore) difficilmente avrebbe potuto infliggerci un’umiliazione più pesante di quella. Ma, naturalmente, la verità è che io sono sensibile sul punto del patriottismo; molto più sensibile di chiunque lo fosse a quei tempi. Il nazionalismo estremo è una religione relativamente nuova; e ciò cui pensava questa gente era la vecchia specie di religione. Faceva davvero una grande differenza, per loro, che Guglielmo l’olandese fosse un calvinista mentre Don John era cattolico; e che, qualunque cosa fosse Giorgio I (ed era quasi nulla), non fosse un papista. Il che mi conduce a una fase assai più vitale della mia visione di ciò che non è mai accaduto. Ma coloro che si aspettano che io prorompa in tuoni di anatema teologico rimarranno qui piuttosto bruscamente delusi. Non ho alcuna intenzione, né alcuna necessità, di disputare in questa sede intorno a Lutero e a Leone e alle ragioni e ai torti della rivolta delle nuove sette del Nord. Non ho bisogno di farlo, per la semplice ragione che non credo, nel caso qui immaginato, che ci saremmo occupati anzitutto del Nord. Credo che avremmo invece compreso la posizione enormemente importante nel Sud; e ancor più nell’Est. Tutti gli sguardi si sarebbero volti verso una battaglia ben più centrale della civiltà; e l’eroe di quella battaglia era Don John of Austria.
È stato osservato, e non a torto, che il Papato pareva curiosamente noncurante del pericolo settentrionale del protestantesimo. Lo era; ma soprattutto perché non era affatto noncurante del pericolo orientale dell’Islam. Per tutto quel periodo un Papa dopo l’altro rivolse un appello dopo l’altro ai principi d’Europa perché si unissero in difesa di tutta la cristianità contro l’attacco asiatico. Non ottennero quasi alcuna risposta; e soltanto una flotta raccogliticcia delle loro galee, con alcune veneziane, genovesi e d’altrove, poté essere inviata a fermare il Turco dallo spazzare l’intero Mediterraneo. Questo è l’immenso fatto storico che le contese dottrinali del Nord hanno occultato; ed è per questo che qui non mi occupo delle contese dottrinali del Nord. Quell’età non fu l’età della Reformation. Fu l’età dell’ultima grande invasione asiatica, che per poco non distrusse l’Europa. Verso il tempo in cui la Reformation cominciava, i Turchi, nel bel mezzo dell’Europa, distrussero d’un colpo l’antico regno di Boemia. Verso il tempo in cui la Reformation aveva finito la sua opera, le orde uscite dall’Asia assediavano Vienna. Furono sventate dal colpo di Sobieski il Polacco, come un secolo prima dal colpo di Don John of Austria. Ma arrivarono a tanto dal sommergere le città d’Europa. Bisogna anche ricordare che quest’ultima spinta musulmana fu davvero una cosa selvaggia e incalcolabile, in confronto alla prima spinta del Saladino e dei Saraceni. L’alta cultura araba delle Crusades era da tempo perita; e gli invasori erano Tartari e Turchi e una plebaglia proveniente da terre realmente barbariche. Non erano i Mori, ma gli Unni. Non era il Saladino contro Riccardo o Averroè contro Aquino; era qualcosa di molto più simile al peggiore e più forsennato romanzo d’appendice sul Pericolo Giallo.
Ho un grande rispetto per le virtù reali e per la sana, se pur sopita, virilità dell’Islam. Amo quell’elemento che vi è insieme democratico e dignitoso; simpatizzo con molti elementi che la maggior parte degli europei (e tutti gli americani) chiamerebbero pigri e retrogradi. Ma, fatta ogni concessione a questi meriti morali, del genere più semplice, sfido chiunque abbia un senso del confronto culturale a tollerare l’immagine di un’Europa del Renaissance consegnata ai Bashi-Bazouk e alle selvagge masse mongole della decadenza. Ma è quasi altrettanto grave se consideriamo soltanto i veti dell’Islam primitivo; e la maggior parte delle sue virtù erano veti. Tutto sommato, agli occhi degli uomini del Mediterraneo in special modo, passò sopra il loro mare scintillante soltanto l’ombra di un grande Distruttore. Ciò che udivano era la voce di Azrael piuttosto che di Allah. La loro era la visione che sarebbe stata lo sfondo del mio sogno; e che innalzava tutte le sue figure più nobili, inglesi, spagnole o scozzesi, alle altitudini della sfida e del martirio. Il secco vento che sospingeva innanzi a sé una polvere di idoli infranti minacciava le statue in equilibrio di Angelo e di Donatello, là dove risplendono sulle alture intorno al mare centrale; e la sabbia degli alti deserti scendeva, come montagne mobili di polvere e di sete e di morte, sulla profonda cultura delle sacre vigne; e sui canti e sulle profonde risate dei vigneti. E soprattutto, quelle nubi che si stringevano intorno a loro erano come le cortine dell’harem, dai cui angoli sporgono i volti di pietra degli eunuchi; si distendeva come una vasta ombra sopra corti scintillanti e spazi che si chiudevano il silenzio dell’Oriente, e tutto il suo muto compromesso con la grossolanità dell’uomo. Queste cose, sopra ogni altra, si stringevano intorno a quell’alto e contrastato romanzo del Cavaliere e della Dama perfetti, che gli uomini del sangue cristiano non possono mai raggiungere né mai abbandonare; ma che questi due soli, forse, avrebbero potuto raggiungere e fare una sola carne.
Historians quarrel about whether the English under Elizabeth preferred the Prayer-Book or the Mass-Book. But surely nobody will quarrel about whether they preferred the Crescent or the Cross. The learned dispute about how England was divided into Catholics and Protestants. But nobody will dispute what England would have felt, when told that the whole world was now desperately divided into Christians and Mohammedans. In short, I think that under this influence England would have simply broadened her mind; even if it were only broadened to take in a big battle instead of a small battle. Of that broader battle, and our best chances in it, Don John of Austria was universally regarded as the incarnation and the uplifted sign. Not only the praise due to heroes, but the flattery inevitably paid to princes, would have carried that triumph before him wherever he went like a noise of trumpets. Everybody would have felt in him both the Renaissance and the Crusade; as those two things are warp and woof in the golden tapestries of Ariosto. Everybody would have felt both the rebirth of Europe and its all-but death. Nor need the praise have come merely from any common flatterers. All good Englishmen could have become good Europeans; I should express my meaning better if I said great Europeans. In all that crowd, perhaps, only Shakespeare could not have been greater. And yet I am not so sure; for he might certainly have been gayer. Whatever his politics were (and I suspect they were much like those of his friend the Catholic Southampton) there is no doubt that his tragedies are eternally twisted and tortured with something like an obsession about usurpation and slain kings and stolen crowns; and all the insecurity of royal and every other right. Nobody knows how his heart, if not his mind, might have expanded in that truly “glorious summer” of a sovereignty which satisfied his sixteenth-century hunger for a heroic and high-hearted sovereign. He at least would not have been indifferent to the significance of the great triumph in the Mediterranean. Supporters of the extreme spiritual insularity have often quoted the great lines in which Shakespeare praised England, as something separate and cut-off by the sea. They rather tend to forget what he really praised her for.
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son.
I really think that the man who wrote those lines would have welcomed the victor of Lepanto almost as warmly as he must have welcomed a Scotch Calvinist who was frightened of a drawn dirk.
About Mary I imagine there would have been no difficulty at all. Mary was the perfectly legitimate heir to the throne of England, which is more than can be said for Elizabeth. The general sense of loyalty to the legitimate sovereign, which was enormously strong in England, would have flowed towards her more freely than towards Elizabeth; because she was a more popular and approachable sort of person. She who had so often, and perhaps too often, kindled love even in the very house of hatred, might surely have been loved sufficiently in a happier household of love enthroned; as in the glowing palace of René of Provence. I see no difficulty about her popularity; but even her husband, whether he were called Consort or King, might surely, to say the least of it, have been as popular as any other king-consort. I will not say he would be more popular than William of Orange; for he could not be less. But the English can be polite to foreigners, even foreign consorts. Tennyson, as Poet Laureate, was struck by the resemblance between Prince Albert and an ideal knight of the Round Table. Ben Jonson, as Poet Laureate, would not have to stretch politeness quite so far, in order to compare Don John to an Arthurian knight. At least nobody could say he was a carpet-knight. But, what is much more important, Britain would have been in another and more real sense back in Arthurian times. It would be defending the whole tradition of Roman culture and Christian morals against heathens and barbarians from the ends of the earth. If that had been fully realised, do you think anyone would have gone about asking whether a good Calvinist ought to be a Supralapsarian or a Sublapsarian? It would no longer be a provincial question of whether some Puritan trooper had knocked the nose off a stone saint in Salisbury Cathedral; it would be a question of whether some dervish out of the desert should dance among the shattered fragments of the Moses of Michelangelo. All normal Christians, if they had understood the peril, would have closed up in defence of Christendom. And England would have got glory in the battle, as she did when that ship with crimson sails carried the English leopards to the storming of Acre.
It might, I fear, have meant a certain amount of hostility to France: the rival of the Spanish-Austrian combination; though even here there are reconciling influences and Mary’s sympathies would always have been with the country of her youth and her most famous poem. But, anyhow, it would not have been like the hostility to France, or rather blind hatred of France, which we did inherit from the victory of the Whigs. It would have been more like the medieval wars with the French, waged by men who were half French themselves. The English conquests in France were a sort of eddy and backwash of the original French conquest in England; the whole business was almost a civil war. For there was more internationalism in medieval war than there is in modern peace. The same was true of the actual wars which did break out between France and Spain; they did not break the inner unity of the Latin culture. Louis the Fourteenth was guilty of a slight exaggeration in saying that the mountains called the Pyrenees have entirely disappeared from the landscape. Many careful tourists have verified their existence and reported the royal error. But there was this truth in it; that the Pyrenees were in every sense a natural division. The Straits of Dover soon became a very unnatural division. They became a spiritual abyss, not between different patron saints but between different gods; perhaps between different universes. The men who fought at Crecy and Agincourt had the same religion— to disregard. But the men who fought at Blenheim and at Waterloo had this entirely novel feature—that the English had an equal hatred for French religion and for French irreligion. They could not understand the ideals of either side in the great civil war of all civilisation. The limitation was really rather like the Straits of Dover, being both narrow and bleak and dangerous enough to be decisive; bitter as the sea and aptly symbolised by sea-sickness. Perhaps, after all, there was a point in the tale told in our nursery histories— that it was the last Catholic queen who felt the loss of the last French possession, and had “Calais” written on her heart. With her died, perhaps, the last of that spirit which had somewhere in its depths a spiritual Channel Tunnel.
Gli storici si accapigliano se gli inglesi, sotto Elisabetta, preferissero il libro delle preghiere o il messale. Ma di certo nessuno si accapiglierà sul fatto se preferissero la Mezzaluna o la Croce. I dotti disputano su come l’Inghilterra fosse divisa fra cattolici e protestanti. Ma nessuno disputerà su ciò che l’Inghilterra avrebbe provato, sentendosi dire che il mondo intero era ormai disperatamente diviso fra cristiani e maomettani. In breve, credo che sotto tale influsso l’Inghilterra avrebbe semplicemente allargato la propria mente; foss’anche allargata soltanto per accogliere una grande battaglia invece di una piccola. Di quella battaglia più vasta, e delle nostre migliori speranze in essa, Don Giovanni d’Austria era universalmente considerato l’incarnazione e il segno levato in alto. Non soltanto la lode dovuta agli eroi, ma l’adulazione inevitabilmente tributata ai principi, avrebbe recato quel trionfo innanzi a lui, ovunque andasse, come un suono di trombe. Ognuno avrebbe sentito in lui tanto il Rinascimento quanto la Crociata; come quelle due cose sono ordito e trama negli aurei arazzi dell’Ariosto. Ognuno avrebbe sentito insieme la rinascita dell’Europa e la sua quasi morte. Né la lode sarebbe dovuta venire soltanto da comuni adulatori. Tutti i buoni inglesi avrebbero potuto diventare buoni europei; esprimerei meglio il mio pensiero dicendo grandi europei. In tutta quella folla, forse, soltanto Shakespeare non avrebbe potuto essere più grande. Eppure non ne sono così certo; poiché di sicuro avrebbe potuto essere più gaio. Quali che fossero le sue idee politiche (e sospetto fossero assai simili a quelle del suo amico, il cattolico Southampton) non v’è dubbio che le sue tragedie siano eternamente contorte e tormentate da qualcosa come un’ossessione per l’usurpazione, i re trucidati e le corone rubate; e per tutta l’insicurezza del diritto regale e d’ogni altro diritto. Nessuno sa come il suo cuore, se non la sua mente, si sarebbe potuto dilatare in quella davvero «gloriosa estate» di una sovranità che appagava la sua sete cinquecentesca di un sovrano eroico e magnanimo. Egli, almeno, non sarebbe rimasto indifferente al significato del grande trionfo nel Mediterraneo. I sostenitori dell’estrema insularità spirituale hanno spesso citato i grandi versi in cui Shakespeare lodò l’Inghilterra, come qualcosa di separato e reciso dal mare. Piuttosto sogliono dimenticare ciò per cui davvero la lodò.
Questa nutrice, questo grembo fecondo di re regali, Temuti per la loro stirpe e famosi per la loro nascita, Rinomati per le loro gesta tanto lontano da casa, Per servizio cristiano e vera cavalleria, Quanto il sepolcro, nell’ostinata Giudea, Del riscatto del mondo, il Figlio della beata Maria.
Credo davvero che l’uomo che scrisse quei versi avrebbe accolto il vincitore di Lepanto quasi con lo stesso calore con cui dovette accogliere un calvinista scozzese spaventato da un pugnale sguainato.
Quanto a Maria, immagino non vi sarebbe stata difficoltà alcuna. Maria era l’erede perfettamente legittima al trono d’Inghilterra, il che è più di quanto si possa dire di Elisabetta. Il generale senso di lealtà verso il sovrano legittimo, enormemente forte in Inghilterra, sarebbe defluito verso di lei più liberamente che verso Elisabetta; poiché era persona più amabile e accessibile. Colei che tanto spesso, e forse troppo spesso, aveva acceso amore persino nella casa stessa dell’odio, avrebbe certo potuto essere amata a sufficienza in una più lieta dimora dell’amore insediato in trono; come nel fulgido palazzo di Renato di Provenza. Non vedo difficoltà circa la sua popolarità; ma persino il suo sposo, lo si chiamasse Consorte o Re, avrebbe potuto certo, a dir poco, essere popolare quanto qualsiasi altro re consorte. Non dirò che sarebbe stato più popolare di Guglielmo d’Orange; ché non avrebbe potuto esserlo di meno. Ma gli inglesi sanno essere cortesi con gli stranieri, persino con i consorti stranieri. Tennyson, come Poeta Laureato, fu colpito dalla somiglianza fra il principe Alberto e un ideale cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda. Ben Jonson, come Poeta Laureato, non avrebbe dovuto forzare la cortesia fino a tal punto, per paragonare Don Giovanni a un cavaliere arturiano. Almeno nessuno avrebbe potuto dire che fosse un cavaliere da salotto. Ma, ciò che è assai più importante, la Britannia sarebbe stata, in un senso altro e più reale, tornata ai tempi arturiani. Avrebbe difeso l’intera tradizione della cultura romana e della morale cristiana contro pagani e barbari dai confini della terra. Se ciò fosse stato pienamente compreso, credete che qualcuno sarebbe andato in giro a chiedersi se un buon calvinista dovesse essere supralapsario o sublapsario? Non sarebbe più stata una questione provinciale, se qualche soldato puritano avesse mozzato il naso a un santo di pietra nella Cattedrale di Salisbury; sarebbe stata la questione se qualche derviscio venuto dal deserto dovesse danzare fra i frantumi in pezzi del Mosè di Michelangelo. Tutti i cristiani normali, avessero compreso il pericolo, si sarebbero serrati in difesa della Cristianità. E l’Inghilterra avrebbe conseguito gloria nella battaglia, come fece quando quella nave dalle vele cremisi portò i leopardi inglesi all’assalto di Acri.
Avrebbe potuto significare, temo, una certa dose di ostilità verso la Francia: la rivale della combinazione ispano-austriaca; benché anche qui vi siano influssi conciliatori, e le simpatie di Maria sarebbero sempre state per il paese della sua giovinezza e della sua poesia più celebre. Ma, in ogni caso, non sarebbe stata come l’ostilità verso la Francia, o piuttosto il cieco odio della Francia, che davvero ereditammo dalla vittoria dei Whig. Sarebbe stata più simile alle guerre medievali coi francesi, condotte da uomini che erano essi stessi mezzi francesi. Le conquiste inglesi in Francia furono una sorta di gorgo e risacca dell’originaria conquista francese in Inghilterra; l’intera faccenda fu quasi una guerra civile. Poiché vi era più internazionalismo nella guerra medievale di quanto ve ne sia nella pace moderna. Lo stesso valeva per le guerre effettive che pure scoppiarono fra Francia e Spagna; esse non spezzarono l’intima unità della cultura latina. Luigi XIV fu colpevole di una lieve esagerazione nel dire che i monti chiamati Pirenei erano interamente scomparsi dal paesaggio. Molti scrupolosi viaggiatori ne hanno verificato l’esistenza e segnalato l’errore regale. Ma vi era questa verità in ciò: che i Pirenei erano, in ogni senso, una divisione naturale. Lo Stretto di Dover divenne ben presto una divisione assai innaturale. Divenne un abisso spirituale, non fra santi patroni diversi ma fra dèi diversi; forse fra universi diversi. Gli uomini che combatterono a Crécy e ad Azincourt avevano la stessa religione — da trascurare. Ma gli uomini che combatterono a Blenheim e a Waterloo presentavano questo tratto affatto nuovo — che gli inglesi nutrivano eguale odio per la religione francese e per l’irreligione francese. Non riuscivano a comprendere gli ideali di nessuna delle due parti nella grande guerra civile dell’intera civiltà. Quella limitazione somigliava davvero allo Stretto di Dover, essendo insieme angusta e desolata e abbastanza pericolosa da risultare decisiva; amara come il mare e ben simboleggiata dal mal di mare. Forse, dopo tutto, vi era un fondo di verità nel racconto narrato nelle nostre storie per l’infanzia — che fu l’ultima regina cattolica a sentire la perdita dell’ultimo possedimento francese, e ad avere «Calais» scritto sul cuore. Con lei morì, forse, l’ultimo di quello spirito che aveva, in qualche sua profondità, uno spirituale Tunnel della Manica.
But this linking up of Europe in the Renaissance would have made easier and not harder the linking up of Europe in the Revolution; in the sense of the general Reform that was really rational and necessary in the eighteenth century. It would have been larger and clearer in its tests and ideals, if it had not been anticipated by a mere triumph of the richest aristocrats over the English crown. If England had not become entirely a country of squires, it might have become, like Spain, a country of peasants; or at any rate remained a country of yeomen. It might have stood the siege of commercial exploitation and commercial decline, of mere employment followed by mere unemployment. It might have learned the meaning of equality as well as liberty. I know at least one Englishman who wishes to-day that he were as hopeful about the immediate future of England as about the immediate future of Spain. But in my vision they might have learned from each other and produced, among other things, one prodigious consequence; America would be a very different place.
There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallised anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a Christendom that was entirely Christian. There was a moment when Humanism had the road straight before it; but, what is even more important, the road also straight behind it. It might have been a real progress, not losing anything of what was good in the past. The significance of two people like Mary Stuart and Don John of Austria is that in them Religion and the Renaissance had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new conquests and discoveries to their sons. They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth-century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the whole Church. There was a moment when religion could have digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers; as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the central Christian tradition. What darkened that dawn was the dust and smoke from the struggles of the dogmatising sectaries in Scotland, in Holland, and eventually in England. But for that, on the Continent, the heresy of Jansenism had never so much over-shadowed the splendour of the Counter-Reformation. And England would have gone the way of Shakespeare rather than the way of Milton; which latter degenerated rapidly into the way of Muggleton.
There is perhaps, therefore, something more than a fancy, certainly something more than an accident, in this connection between the two romantic figures and the great turning-point of history. They might really have turned it to the right rather than the left; or at least prevented it from turning too far to the left. The point about Don John of Austria is that, like Bayard and a few others in that transition, he was unmistakably the original medieval knight, with the wider accomplishments and ambitions of the Renaissance added to him. But if we look at some of his contemporaries, as for instance, at Cecil, we see an entirely new type, in which there is no such combination or tradition. A man like Cecil is not chivalrous, does not want to be chivalrous, and (what is most important of all) does not pretend to be chivalrous. Of course there was sham chivalry, as there is a sham of everything; and mean and treacherous medieval men made a false parade of it with pageants and heraldry. But a mean man like Cecil did not make any parade of it, or any pretence of it. So far as he knew or cared, it had gone clean out of the world. Yet in fact it had not gone; and a great rally of it among his foes would still have commanded the natural loyalty of Europeans. That is what makes this story so strange; that the forces were there for the deliverance. The Romance of the North could really have replied to the Romance of the South, the rose crying to the laurel; and she who had changed songs with Ronsard, and he who had fought side by side with Cervantes, might truly have met by the very tide and current of their time. It was as if a great wind had turned northward, bearing a gallant ship; and far away in the North a lady opened her lattice upon the sea.
It never happened. It was too natural to happen. I had almost said it was too inevitable to happen. Anyhow, there was nothing natural, let alone inevitable, about what did happen. Now and again Shakespeare, with a horror almost bordering on hysteria, will thrust into the limelight some clown or idiot, to suggest, against the black curtain of tragedy, this incongruity and inconsequence in the things that really do happen. The dark curtains open and there comes forth something; certainly not the Lion of Lepanto clad in gold, nor the Heart of Holyrood, the queen of the poets, who called up the songs of Ronsard and Chastelard; but something quite different and doubtless a sort of comic relief: Jacobus Rex, the grotesque king; clumsy, querulous, padded like an armchair; pedantic; perverted. He had been brought up carefully by the elders of the True Kirk, and he did them credit; piously explaining that he could not bring himself to save his mother’s life because of the superstition to which she was attached. He was a good Puritan; a typical Prohibitionist; intolerant of tobacco; more tolerant of torture and murder and things yet more unnatural. For though he shook with terror at the very shape of the shining sword, he had no difficulty about consigning Fawkes to the rack, and when death had merely been attained by the art of poisoning, he was ready with a pardon, as he cowered under the threats of Carr. What things lay behind those threats and that pardon there is here, I am glad to say, no need to inquire; but the stink of that court, as it reaches us through the purlieus of the Overbury Murder, is such as to make us turn for fresh air. I will not say to the ideal loves of Mary and Don John of Austria, which I have merely imagined, but to the very worst version of the bloody loves of Mary and Bothwell which their most furious enemies have denounced. Compared with all that, loving Bothwell would be as innocent as plucking a rose, and killing Darnley as natural as pulling up a weed.
Ma questo ricongiungersi dell’Europa nel Rinascimento avrebbe reso più facile, e non più difficile, il ricongiungersi dell’Europa nella Rivoluzione; nel senso di quella Riforma generale che nel Settecento era davvero razionale e necessaria. Sarebbe stata più ampia e più limpida nelle sue prove e nei suoi ideali, se non fosse stata anticipata da un mero trionfo dei più ricchi aristocratici sulla Corona inglese. Se l’Inghilterra non fosse divenuta interamente un paese di gentiluomini di campagna, avrebbe potuto divenire, come la Spagna, un paese di contadini; o quantomeno rimanere un paese di piccoli proprietari terrieri. Avrebbe potuto reggere l’assedio dello sfruttamento commerciale e del declino commerciale, del mero impiego seguìto dalla mera disoccupazione. Avrebbe potuto apprendere il significato dell’uguaglianza oltre che della libertà. Conosco almeno un inglese che oggi vorrebbe nutrire per l’immediato futuro dell’Inghilterra la stessa speranza che nutre per l’immediato futuro della Spagna. Ma nella mia visione i due paesi avrebbero potuto imparare l’uno dall’altro e produrre, tra le altre cose, una conseguenza prodigiosa: l’America sarebbe un luogo assai diverso.
Vi fu un momento in cui l’intera Cristianità avrebbe potuto raccogliersi insieme e cristallizzarsi di nuovo, sotto la chimica della nuova cultura; e nondimeno rimanere una Cristianità interamente cristiana. Vi fu un momento in cui l’Umanesimo aveva la strada diritta dinanzi a sé; ma, ciò che è ancor più importante, la strada anche diritta dietro di sé. Avrebbe potuto essere un progresso reale, senza perdere nulla di quanto vi era di buono nel passato. Il significato di due figure come Maria Stuarda e don Giovanni d’Austria sta in questo: che in loro la Religione e il Rinascimento non avevano litigato; ed essi serbavano la fede dei padri pur essendo colmi dell’idea di trasmettere nuove conquiste e scoperte ai loro figli. Attingevano i loro istinti profondi dalla cavalleria medievale senza per questo rifiutare di nutrire l’intelletto del sapere del Cinquecento; e vi fu un momento in cui questo spirito avrebbe potuto pervadere il mondo intero e la Chiesa intera. Vi fu un momento in cui la religione avrebbe potuto digerire Platone come un tempo aveva digerito Aristotele. Anzi, avrebbe potuto digerire tutto ciò che di più sano vi è in Rabelais e in Montaigne e in molti altri; avrebbe potuto condannare talune cose in questi pensatori, come fece in Aristotele. Soltanto lo scossone delle nuove scoperte avrebbe potuto essere assorbito (e in gran parte, invero, fu assorbito) dalla tradizione cristiana centrale. Ciò che oscurò quell’alba fu la polvere e il fumo delle lotte dei settari dogmatizzanti in Scozia, in Olanda e infine in Inghilterra. Se non fosse stato per questo, sul Continente l’eresia del giansenismo non avrebbe mai adombrato tanto lo splendore della Controriforma. E l’Inghilterra sarebbe andata per la via di Shakespeare anziché per la via di Milton; la quale ultima degenerò rapidamente nella via di Muggleton.
Vi è forse, dunque, qualcosa di più di una fantasia, e certamente qualcosa di più di un accidente, in questo nesso tra le due figure romantiche e il grande punto di svolta della storia. Avrebbero potuto davvero volgerlo a destra anziché a sinistra; o almeno impedire che volgesse troppo a sinistra. Il punto riguardo a don Giovanni d’Austria è che egli, come Bayard e pochi altri in quel trapasso, era inconfondibilmente l’originario cavaliere medievale, cui si aggiungevano le più vaste doti e ambizioni del Rinascimento. Ma se guardiamo ad alcuni suoi contemporanei, per esempio a Cecil, scorgiamo un tipo del tutto nuovo, in cui non vi è alcuna simile combinazione o tradizione. Un uomo come Cecil non è cavalleresco, non vuole essere cavalleresco e (ciò che più importa) non pretende di essere cavalleresco. Certo, vi era una falsa cavalleria, come vi è la contraffazione di ogni cosa; e uomini medievali vili e traditori ne facevano una vana ostentazione con cortei e blasoni. Ma un uomo vile come Cecil non ne faceva alcuna ostentazione, né alcuna finzione. Per quanto egli ne sapeva o gliene importava, essa era sparita del tutto dal mondo. Eppure, in realtà, non era sparita; e un grande risorgere di essa tra i suoi nemici avrebbe ancora saputo comandare la naturale fedeltà degli europei. È questo che rende così strana questa vicenda: che le forze per la liberazione c’erano. Il Romanzo del Nord avrebbe davvero potuto rispondere al Romanzo del Sud, la rosa gridando all’alloro; e colei che aveva scambiato canti con Ronsard, e colui che aveva combattuto fianco a fianco con Cervantes, avrebbero potuto veramente incontrarsi sulla stessa marea e corrente del loro tempo. Fu come se un gran vento si fosse volto a settentrione, recando una gagliarda nave; e lontano, al Nord, una dama aprisse la sua finestra a graticcio sul mare.
Non accadde mai. Era troppo naturale perché accadesse. Avrei quasi detto che era troppo inevitabile perché accadesse. In ogni caso, non vi fu nulla di naturale, per non dire di inevitabile, in ciò che accadde. Di quando in quando Shakespeare, con un orrore che rasenta quasi l’isteria, spinge sotto la luce della ribalta qualche buffone o idiota, per suggerire, contro la nera cortina della tragedia, questa incongruità e sconnessione nelle cose che davvero accadono. Le tenebrose cortine si aprono e ne viene avanti qualcosa; non certo il Leone di Lepanto rivestito d’oro, né il Cuore di Holyrood, la regina dei poeti, che suscitava i canti di Ronsard e di Chastelard; bensì qualcosa di affatto diverso e, senza dubbio, una sorta di sollievo comico: Jacobus Rex, il grottesco re; goffo, querulo, imbottito come una poltrona; pedante; pervertito. Era stato allevato con cura dagli anziani della Vera Chiesa, e faceva loro onore; spiegando piamente che non poteva indursi a salvare la vita di sua madre a causa della superstizione cui ella era attaccata. Era un buon puritano; un tipico proibizionista; intollerante del tabacco; più tollerante della tortura e dell’omicidio e di cose ancor più snaturate. Poiché, per quanto tremasse di terrore alla sola vista della lucente spada, non provava alcuna difficoltà a consegnare Fawkes alla ruota, e quando la morte era stata semplicemente conseguita mediante l’arte del veleno, era pronto con un perdono, mentre si rannicchiava sotto le minacce di Carr. Che cosa si celasse dietro quelle minacce e quel perdono, non v’è qui, son lieto di dirlo, alcun bisogno d’indagare; ma il fetore di quella corte, quale ci giunge attraverso i bassifondi dell’assassinio di Overbury, è tale da farci volgere in cerca d’aria fresca. Non dirò verso gli ideali amori di Maria e di don Giovanni d’Austria, che ho soltanto immaginato, bensì verso la peggiore versione dei sanguinosi amori di Maria e di Bothwell, quella che i loro nemici più furiosi hanno denunciato. In confronto a tutto ciò, amare Bothwell sarebbe stato tanto innocente quanto cogliere una rosa, e uccidere Darnley tanto naturale quanto strappare un’erbaccia.
And so, after that one wild glimpse of the possibility of the impossible, we sink back at the best into a series of third-rate things. Charles the First was better, a man sad and proud, but good so far as a man can be good without being good-humoured. Charles the Second was good-humoured without being good; but the worst of him was that his life was a long surrender; James the Second had his grandfather’s virtues, so far as they went, and was therefore betrayed and broken. Then came William the Dutchman, with whom there again enters the savour of something sinister and alien. I would not suggest that such Calvinists were Antinomian Calvinists; but there is something strange in the thought that twice, in that time, there entered with that unnatural logic the rumour and savour of unnatural desire. But by the time we come to Anne and the first featureless George, it is no longer the King that counts. Merchant princes have superseded all other princes; England is committed to mere commerce and the capitalist development; and we see successively established the National Debt, the Bank of England, Wood’s Halfpence, the South Sea Bubble, and all the typical institutions of Business Government. I will not discuss here whether the modern sequel, with its cosmopolitan trusts, its complicated and practically secret financial control, its march of machinery and its effacement of private property and personal liberty, be on the whole good or bad. I will only express an intuition that, even if it is very good, something else might have been better. I need not deny that in certain respects the world has progressed in order and philanthropy; I need only state my suspicion that the world might have progressed much quicker. And I think that the northern countries, especially, would have progressed much quicker, if the philanthropy had been from the first guided by a larger philosophy, like that of Bellarmine and More; if it had drawn directly from the Renaissance and not been deflected and delayed by the sulky sectarianism of the seventeenth century. But in any case the great moral institutions of modern times, the Straddle, the Wheat Corner, the Merger, and the rest will not be affected by my little literary fancy; and I need feel no responsibility if I waste some hours of my inefficient existence in dreaming of the things that might have been (which the determinists will tell me could never have been) and in weaving this faded chaplet for the prince of heroes and the queen of hearts.
Perhaps there are things that are too great to happen, and too big to pass through the narrow doors of birth. For this world is too small for the soul of man; and, since the end of Eden, the very sky is not large enough for lovers.
E così, dopo quell’unico folle barbaglio in cui balenò la possibilità dell’impossibile, ricadiamo, nel migliore dei casi, in una sfilza di cose di terz’ordine. Carlo I fu migliore, uomo triste e altero, ma buono per quanto un uomo può esserlo senza avere il buon umore. Carlo II ebbe il buon umore senza essere buono; ma il peggio di lui fu che la sua vita fu una lunga resa; Giacomo II ebbe le virtù del nonno, per quel poco che valevano, e fu perciò tradito e spezzato. Poi venne Guglielmo l’Olandese, con il quale entra di nuovo il sentore di qualcosa di sinistro e di estraneo. Non vorrei insinuare che simili calvinisti fossero calvinisti antinomiani; ma c’è qualcosa di strano nel pensare che due volte, in quel tempo, entrasse insieme a quella logica contro natura il vociferare e il sentore di un desiderio contro natura. Ma quando arriviamo ad Anna e al primo, scialbo Giorgio, non è più il Re a contare. I principi mercanti hanno soppiantato tutti gli altri principi; l’Inghilterra si è votata al puro commercio e allo sviluppo capitalistico; e vediamo istituirsi l’una dopo l’altra la Rendita Nazionale, la Banca d’Inghilterra, i mezzi penny di Wood, la Bolla dei Mari del Sud, e tutte le tipiche istituzioni del Governo degli affari. Non discuterò qui se il seguito moderno, con i suoi trust cosmopoliti, il suo complicato e praticamente segreto controllo finanziario, la sua marcia delle macchine e la sua cancellazione della proprietà privata e della libertà personale, sia nel complesso un bene o un male. Esprimerò soltanto l’intuizione che, anche se è cosa molto buona, qualcos’altro avrebbe potuto essere migliore. Non ho bisogno di negare che sotto certi aspetti il mondo abbia progredito in ordine e filantropia; ho bisogno soltanto di dichiarare il mio sospetto che il mondo avrebbe potuto progredire assai più in fretta. E penso che i paesi del nord, in particolare, avrebbero progredito assai più in fretta, se la filantropia fosse stata guidata fin dal principio da una filosofia più ampia, come quella di Bellarmino e di More; se avesse attinto direttamente dal Rinascimento e non fosse stata sviata e ritardata dal cupo settarismo del diciassettesimo secolo. Ma in ogni caso le grandi istituzioni morali dei tempi moderni, lo Straddle, l’Accaparramento del grano, la Fusione e tutto il resto, non saranno toccate dalla mia piccola fantasticheria letteraria; e non mi occorre sentire alcuna responsabilità se sciupo qualche ora della mia inefficiente esistenza sognando le cose che avrebbero potuto essere (le quali, mi diranno i deterministi, non avrebbero mai potuto essere) e intrecciando questo sbiadito serto per il principe degli eroi e la regina dei cuori.
Forse esistono cose troppo grandi per accadere, e troppo grandi per passare per le anguste porte della nascita. Perché questo mondo è troppo piccolo per l’anima dell’uomo; e, dopo la fine dell’Eden, il cielo stesso non è abbastanza vasto per gli amanti.